The main purpose of the lean approach is to fight, using appropriate principles, methods and techniques, the seven manufacturing wastes, while the green approach, perfectly in line with the lean approach, fights the eighth waste: avoidable or dangerous emissions caused by production. These wastes are present also in office work and must and can be eliminated. But let us list them and briefly comment on each of them.<\/p>\n
Defects<\/b>\u00a0Whenever an error is committed a correction is needed also and that causes some kind of reworking and reworking is definitely a form of waste for it has no value for the customer. The same is true with missing or incomplete information: they too require reworking and cause waste.<\/p>\n
Inventory<\/b>\u00a0Desks with piles of letters, folders, reports, documents are clear indicators that people have more work to do than they can do at the moment or that they do not regularly file what is no longer needed.<\/p>\n
Valueless processes<\/b>\u00a0Sometimes customers are given more than they require: redundant controls, more information or more papers than needed etc. Very often offices perform activities which have no value at all for the customer. Examples of these are: inviting to meetings unneeded persons (one never knows\u2026), sending e-mails to everybody in the company, performing unnecessary activities (\u201cwe have always done like that\u201d), requiring too many signatures etc.<\/p>\n
Waiting<\/b>\u00a0A lot of time is wasted waiting for something to happen: waiting for a person to arrive, waiting for an answer or an information, waiting for an equipment to be repaired etc. Waiting is certainly a waste of the most precious resource: time!<\/p>\n
Movements<\/b>\u00a0Every movement that is not strictly necessary is a waste. Examples of unnecessary movements: moving from an office to another in search of information or documents or in order to use an equipment (like photocopier or printer) located in that office. Another frequent example is the moving around in search of a document or an object that no one knows where the hell it can be.<\/p>\n
Transports<\/b>\u00a0Every transfer of materials or information or equipment from one place to another can be a waste. It is normally due to an inefficient layout of the offices.<\/p>\n
Overproduction<\/b>\u00a0Another form of waste is to produce too many information or to communicate them before they are needed by the person performing the next activity in the process.<\/p>\n
Emissions<\/b>\u00a0Offices too produce emissions due to the use of energy, to heating and paper consumption. So they too contribute to this form of waste.<\/p>\n
What are the main principles to follow to implement a lean transformation of office work? We have identified the following five principles:<\/p>\n
1. Offices, just like productive processes, must be organized by value streams.<\/p>\n
2. A posteriori controls should be minimized by actions and procedures to prevent errors.<\/p>\n
3. Transactions number should be reduced<\/p>\n
4. All non productive processes should be periodically analyzed in order to identify and eliminate all kind of waste.<\/p>\n
5. The role of people working in offices should be reconsidered: some of their time must be spared as a consequence of the lean transformation and they must become agents of lean change and continuous improvement.<\/p>\n
What are the techniques that can be used to fight wastes and to apply lean principles?<\/p>\n
There are seven such techniques and they must be applied according to any specific situation.<\/p>\n
Quantitative analysis of processes and activities<\/b>\u00a0this technique is very useful in complex situations where many resources are involved. Its objective is to measure each activity of each person in terms of time spent and volumes processed. This allows us to understand the weight of value and non value activities before proposing any change. Our experience shows that non value activities in most cases are even more than 50% of the total activities performed.<\/p>\n
Value stream mapping<\/b>\u00a0this is the basic tool for simplifying every kind of process (productive and non productive). It is very useful to identify all possible improvements and to emphasize the importance of the variable \u201ctime\u201d in office work.<\/p>\n
Standardization techniques<\/b>\u00a0these techniques are even more important in office work than in production just because office people are far less sensitive to the need of standardizing their work. Examples of standardization techniques are: use of precompiled documents, predefined input masks for data entry, elimination of \u201cparallel\u201d information systems ( i.e. Excel files), efficient definition of work flows, use of visual tools etc.<\/p>\n
Box Score<\/b>\u00a0Measuring the performances of office work is as important as it is to measure those of production and logistics. A box score showing the performances of the offices in terms of quality, costs and service provided is a very important tool to ensure continuous improvement.<\/p>\n
Cross Training<\/b>\u00a0Cross training of office people is essential in order to avoid delays or errors in case of absence of a person or in case of unexpected fluctuations in the volume of certain activities.<\/p>\n
Mini TPM<\/b>\u00a0in order to avoid unexpected equipment failures it might be useful to apply a simplified TPM system.<\/p>\n
Mini 5 S<\/b>\u00a0in case of messy offices the 5S technique might prove particularly useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The main purpose of the lean approach is to fight, using appropriate principles, methods and techniques, the seven manufacturing wastes, while the green approach, perfectly in line with the lean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1142,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en"],"yoast_head":"\n