{"id":2320,"date":"2016-03-17T13:17:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T18:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2016-02-24T20:46:04","modified_gmt":"2016-02-25T01:46:04","slug":"lean-thinking-for-the-office-and-admin-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/lean-thinking-for-the-office-and-admin-areas\/","title":{"rendered":"Lean Thinking for the Office and Admin Areas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: Vishnu Rayapeddi is a recognized pioneer of Lean Management and founder of Productivity Solutions. \u00a0 For a more in-depth discussion on this topic, take a look at this 118-slide training course<\/a>. \u00a0You can view all of his\u00a0Supply Chain training materials on Flevy here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Simple-kanban-board-\"This discussion relates to both Lean and Supply Chain Excellence. \u00a0 Why Supply Chain Excellence? \u00a0 Well, many activities, including customer service (for example, quotation processing, order processing etc); all planning, procurement, and\u00a0purchasing; quality assurance; administrative warehousing and distribution functions; and many other activities take place in offices.<\/p>\n

Most businesses regard lean manufacturing almost exclusively as a set of production tools and techniques. Most businesses who implement lean manufacturing fail to achieve the full benefit of this strategy because the office and administration areas are not included in any kaizen \/ continuous improvement activities.<\/p>\n

If you think lean is about the factory floor only, then remember that typically 60% to 80% of all costs associated with a product line are non-production costs.<\/p>\n

A couple of examples to highlight the wastes in the office areas…<\/p>\n

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  1. An industrial air handling units manufacturing company<\/strong> \u2013 the quotation process used to take 4 weeks and had 55 steps and what this meant was losing valuable customer orders to competition. After a brief introduction on value & waste and process mapping, I asked them to list all the 55 steps on sticky notes. Upon challenging every step and classifying those steps as 1) value Adding (green), 2) Non-Value adding (red) and 3) Non-Value Adding but required (orange), the team ended up with roughly 50% of the steps which fell in to green and orange categories. What this meant was that, the no of steps reduced to 30 and the time in quotation processing reduced to 2 weeks!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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    1. A Printing Company <\/strong>\u2013 From the time a customer order was received and until it was converted in to a production order and passed on to manufacturing, they had 32 steps.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      A similar process as above, reduced the number of steps to 18 and time halved!<\/p>\n

      Also, how many times have you searched for a saved file on your computer and how long did it take to find it? Can we manager our e-records better? The answer is “Yes!”<\/p>\n

      It is all about learning how to stabilize, standardize, and simplify administrative processes using the power of the Toyota Production System (TPS).<\/p>\n

      So, what is a Lean Office?<\/p>\n