Lean Case Study - The Visual Office

SECTOR: Financial Services

A team of people in a financial services organisation were responsible for performing time critical transactions. They promised their customers to move funds within 2 hours of receiving a faxed request. Not in itself a great problem except that you never really knew when the faxes would arrive, although you could pretty much guarantee a surge 2 hours before the end of the day.

The supervisor’s problem was knowing if he was keeping up or falling behind. It was a disaster to get behind as this usually meant it was impossible to cope with the end of day rush. The answer was a workflow board showing every hour the number of faxes received and the number completed.

At a glance everybody in the team knew if they were keeping up or not. When there is only a small gap then staff could get on with other work. If the gap grew, simply asking additional staff to help out quickly improved things.

This was initially a supervisor’s tool, but as the information was public, the team quickly took ownership and started to manage their own workload and manning.