Lean - The Improving Office

An Improving Office continues to improve, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year.

Improvement in the Obvious Office means constantly improving the Quality, Delivery and Cost of the service the office provides.

Waste is anything you do that does not add value for the customer.

You spent a lot of time making sure that the Focused Office identifies who the real customer is and what you do for them. Adding value is everything you do that the customer wants you to do; everything else is waste.

Eliminating or reducing waste means that more time is available to do something for your customer and will always result in an improved performance.

Reducing or eliminating waste is the quickest, easiest, cheapest & most effective way of improving performance

As you have probably realised, you often cannot see waste, it does not always end up in a bin. When time is wasted it simply disappears.

Fear not, waste always appears in one of the following forms:-

Doing it wrong
Every time something is not done correctly first time, someone will have to put it right and the job is delayed – pure waste

Motion
Walking to the printer or filing cabinet never adds value; arm movement at the desk may be necessary but is still not actually adding value and is always waste

Conveyance
Moving work from place to place is not progressing the job and therefore does not add value

Waiting
People with no work to do is complete waste, but people can also wait for a printer to kick into life, or a screen to refresh and of course if the system is down or the network slow, more time is wasted

Overprocessing
Whenever you do more than is absolutely necessary for the customer, you are wasting time and effort, more complete waste

Building inventory
Wherever part completed work sits in piles, whether physically or in a computer file, nothing is happening to it and if nothing is happening to it, it might just as well not be there. Time has been wasted getting the work to that stage and that time could be used more usefully

Excess production

If you have delivered a service earlier than necessary, the customer is not inconvenienced. But time - and hence cost - has been used earlier than absolutely necessary. This is wasteful use of resources.