The GembaKai
Waste Walk

Your team isn’t slow — it’s leaking time. The Waste Walk finds the leaks: two minutes of logging a day for a couple of weeks, a one-hour readout, and the team knows exactly which hours it can win back.

UX
Web-friendly
phone or browser
2
minutes per day
max team commitment
8
Sources exposed
DOWNTIME leaks discovered
3
Targeted workshops
automation · rework · planning
1
Business case
heavy lifting included

What one team actually recovered

Ten days of logging, one readout and two follow-on workshops uncovered a 64% lift in deliverable capacity — no new headcount, no new tooling.

112
hrs / week recovered

Recovered productivity

The hours the team gets back by fixing its two most expensive leaks. Same people, same calendar.

47
hrs / week automated

Manual work waiting for automation

Repeated by hand, week after week, until someone names it. The waste walk surfaces it; the automation workshop picks what to automate first.

85
hrs / week saved

Rework traced upstream

Future rework eliminated by fixing the root cause: more frequent customer interaction, fewer handoffs, more precise acceptance criteria.

The loop

Capture, measure, improve

Three steps that fit inside two weeks — and repeat. Each pass pays for the next.

01

Capture

Two minutes a day, ten working days

Everyone logs what they worked on, and whether it was planned. No timesheets, no surveillance — the data belongs to the team.

Output
A complete picture of where the team’s hours went
02

Measure

One hour to read the data together

The readout turns the logs into hours and dollars, and points the team straight at its most expensive leak. Name it, then pick one workshop to attack it.

Output
A named workshop, a date and a facilitator
03

Improve

Action tied to the data

The workshop produces actions with owners and expected recovery. The next readout shows whether the number moved — either way, the team learns something true.

Output
Recovered hours, proven on your own data
What the team sees

Two minutes to log, a business case to lean on

Capture is the easy part — a couple of taps from any device, just a minute or two a day. The platform does the heavy lifting: all the analytics that turn two weeks of honest data into a case the team can stand behind.

The GembaKai mobile activity log, showing a day’s planned and unplanned entries, in front of a rework workshop board with activity cards sorted into upstream, process, compliance and validation categories.

The hours don’t announce themselves when they leak. GembaKai makes them show up on a board, in front of the whole team, with a category and a name.

The GembaKai loop

Make your business case

In just two weeks the readout puts a dollar figure on lost effort. After one quarter, it tells your team what you've recovered. Workshops in the playbook turn the readout into owned actions — and the next readout tells you whether the actions worked.

Waste Walk business-case readout: $26.6M annual cost of lost effort across 65 teams, 280,985 hours per year of recoverable productivity, projected $13.3M annualized return and $47.9M after two years.

Sample readout — annualized cost of lost effort, recoverable hours and a projected savings curve from quick wins through major transformation. Generated automatically from two weeks of waste walk data.

  • Capture
    Teams capture activities in the Waste Walk app — pinpointing what drains time and energy.
  • Measure
    Team workshops prioritize what to fix — building a strong business case that can’t be ignored.
  • Improve
    Progress is measured. The number moves, or you learn something new, and the platform drives velocity.
Older than software

Built on fifty years of Lean

Born at Toyota and proven across fifty years of Lean practice, the waste walk gives your team a shared vocabulary for waste: DOWNTIME, the eight ways work leaks time. Name them and they stop being the weather — they become something you can measure, price and fix.

D
Defects
Work you already paid for, billed a second time.
O
Overproduction
Building ahead of demand. YAGNI by another name.
W
Waiting
A two-day old pull request, slow approvals, an unresponsive external team.
N
Non-utilized talent
Skilled people on work beneath their skills. The most expensive leak of all.
T
Transportation
The handoff tax: every time work crosses a boundry delays add up.
I
Inventory
Half-finished work: time and effort spent, nothing earned back.
M
Motion
Hand-rolled deployment. Repeated clicks. Death by a thousand context switches.
E
Extra processing
Over-testing. Premature optimization. A meeting with no decision.

The kaizen math

One percent better every day compounds to thirty-seven times over a year. No team hits that cadence exactly — the point is the habit. Steady small improvements beat the single heroic 10× fix, and the waste walk is how a team finds the next one.

1.01365 ≈ 37.8×
The bottom line

Stop tolerating waste, start measuring it

Every two weeks without a waste walk is another two weeks the leaks go unmeasured. Two minutes a day is all the data costs — and the case for change comes straight from your own numbers.