Lean Case Study - The Standardised Office

SECTOR: Government

An organisation I worked with wanted to establish a central pay unit for processing staff pay transactions. This is the process map developed for recording the start of a period of sickness.

When we sat down to document the process, it quickly became obvious that people were handling cases involving the lack of a doctor’s note in different ways. Some staff did not enter the sickness detail onto the computer until they had received the note, while others ignored the problem altogether because they had never been told what to do. The group agreed that in future they would update the computer before asking for a copy of the doctor’s note.

Creating a central pay processing unit required new staff to be trained in each transaction. Staff were given a process map for each transaction together with a fully detailed user guide. And the outcome? Staff were not only trained more quickly in a standard process but actually reduced the error rates previously experienced.