Lean Office

Waste in offices obscures corporate competitiveness

Lean Office is the application of typical Lean Thinking principles to indirect (also known as “transactional”) processes, i.e.:

The “office” processes of manufacturing companies (Administration, Sales, Purchasing...)
The typical processes of service companies (Banks, Insurance, Hospitals, Public Administration, Agencies...)

The application of Lean Office allows processes to be more efficient, thus lowering the relevant cost; more flexible and responsive, eliminating the typical bureaucratisation of office processes; fast and reliable, reducing the response time to customer requests and returning timely and correct outputs with high quality in terms of the managed information.

A Lean Office project is typically organised in this way:

The objective is to analyse and measure AS IS processes, then identify criticalities and inefficiencies (translating them into potential for recovery and improvement) and finally optimise business processes by introducing concepts such as:

VISION BY PROCESSES:

and focus on the internal customer-supplier.

FIGHT AGAINST WASTE:

Elimination of non-value added and unnecessary activities (such as searches for information and documents, duplicate activities, error corrections...) and reduction of non-value added but necessary activities (such as checks, reminders...).

FLOW LOGIC

Activation of operational methods according to which, once a “practice” (be it a request for an estimate, a project, an order...) has been taken over, it must not “stop” until its completion. This means:

Optimising the number of dedicated resources.
Revising the layout of workstations according to the flow.
Reducing the number of interruptions, bottlenecks and hiccups.
Balancing workloads.
Planning and defining in a clear and shared way who should do what.

CHANNELLING FLOWS:

Design of different, smooth and fast flows, distinguished not only by different types of output (file, document, result), but by complexity and processing mode.

Adopting these principles in rethinking activities and redesigning one's modus operandi means improving in terms of both efficiency, by getting the most out of available resources, and effectiveness, by increasing the service offered to customers (internal and external) and the motivation of people.

To achieve these goals, it is necessary to:

Activate awareness-raising paths for the people to be involved, to create the right motivation and a common conceptual basis.

Map and measure business processes using 3 different methodologies, differing in terms of effort, number of resources involved and time taken to develop the results: the Pro.Act.A., the Swim Lane and the Processes Maturity Matrix.

Identify opportunities for improvement and translating them into a master plan.

Activate Kaizen Workshops with which to achieve them.

The design approach may start from a specific process, if critical issues are already known in advance, or alternatively from a broader preliminary analysis to prioritise the intervention and estimate the possible recovery.

The methodology and tool to support the analysis of transactional processes:

Pro.Act.A.® (Processes & Activities Analysis), the answer to how to measure processes in the office

Discover Pro.Act.A