What is Lean Office? Turn your office lean and productive

You may have heard of the Lean Manufacturing application tools for combating waste in industrial processes, alright? Now, regarding the adoption of this same lean methodology for the elimination of waste in administrative processes, have you ever wondered how it works? This is the Lean Office!

In today's guide you will get to know the Lean Office, understand its importance of use and check out much more detail on each of its 4 steps for deployment. Learn that optimizing the flow of administrative processes is just as important as those processes that create the product!

What is Lean Office?

Lean Office is the application of principles of lean thinking to non-manufacturing and physical activities, that is, the office environment or administrative areas of the company. The flow of value, in this case, consists of flow information and knowledge.

Applying Lean Office is necessary for every company that wants to optimize its administrative processes and eliminate waste related to these processes.

Lean Six Sigma is a methodology that seeks to increase the profitability of companies through the improvement of their processes.

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Production versus Administrative process: what are the differences?

When the Lean philosophy came more than 60 years ago, the application of its main tools was strictly intended for manufacturing environments. The reason was clear: it was only possible to combalet wastes that were seen and known. An industrial production process still contemplates precisely this condition, doesn’t it?

It is composed by products that are processed on multiple machines, materials that are stocked in warehouse yards, raw materials that are fed into the process, defective products that are discarded or reworked, problems that are noticed and confronted ...

But considering administrative processes: how to identify waste?

We may not see them but we know they exist:

• Transport and stock of material gives way to information;
• Unnecessary movement and excessive processing are considered as ineffective routines and procedures;
• Waiting time can be measured in simple return of a call or even information to a colleague;
• Over production can be considered as reports and meetings without objectivity;
• Defective products can be considered as incorrect information.

For ease understanding, in the table below we can see a comparison between the manufacturing and the office:

Got it? These are only few of the comparative examples we can make between production and support sectors. Information, when poorly worked, results in sometimes even more significant losses to the company.

Waste identified using Lean Office

As you saw above, when we apply the Lean Office, we can identify wastes that were not noticed in the administrative processes but they are there all the time.

Some of the major wastes that we can realize and highlight when we put Lean Office into practice are:

• Lead time of activities can be long and unpredictable;
• Lack of standardization;
• Generation of batch of documents;
• Many errors in data entry;
• Production of documents or reports that nobody uses;
• Manual tasks that could be automated via system or applications.

What are the benefits of applying Lean Office?

In addition to the whole question of the change of mentality involved in the application of the Lean Office, it also brings several benefits,  which we can highlight:

• Decrease in the processing time of some activities;
• Reduction of work in process (stacks of paper on the tables);
• Reduction of inventories and queues;
• Reduction in the transportation of work units;
• Reorganization of the work environment;
• Reduction of process steps;
• Greater involvement of employees;
• Level planning / balancing of activities;
• Greater control of the information produced;
• Better systematic problem identification;
• Greater flexibility to respond to changes in demand.

4 steps for Lean Office implementation

1. Identify the value in your office

Here the mission is to identify the waste. The first step is to understand what strategic objectives need to be achieved by the processes in your industry or office. You need to guarantee that the internal or external customer is satisfied.

If it is people management, you need to understand what the organization wants to achieve through recruitment and selection processes, training and human resources. If it is financial, what should be done and performed before accounts payable and receivable. If it is quality, what is expected to be received after improvements in processes and products ... And so on!

Then you need to map this process, separating activities that add value to those that do not add value to information and reports that seek to meet expected demand.

For this purpose, the tool Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and the SIPOC can help you.

2. Raise the added value in your processes

When identifying what is value and what is not value in the process of your office, it remains to implement lean tools that eliminate or at least reduce these wastes.

In this case the 5S program can help you increase the flow of information and productivity of your process. Healthy practices adopted by your entire team, result in an organized and clean work environment with clearly understood activities and tasks that are respected.

3. Standardize the New Value Stream Conceded

Did you use VSM to set the value in your office process and implemented the 5S program to combat the identified wastes and thus boost the performance of your entire industry?

After that the goal is to standardize this new process so that the performance achieved remains stabilized.

The way for this is not different from productive processes: reviewing the procedures of your office that involve the changes of improvement and ensuring through training, lectures and meetings that they are clearly understood and fulfilled in the day to day work of the employees .

4. Stimulate the cycle of continuous improvement

Remember the Kaizen philosophy of Lean Manufacturing: "Today better than yesterday, tomorrow better than today."?

The cycle of continuous improvement should not stop here. Having made several improvements in the Lean Office deployment process, the quest for higher performance should continue.

To satisfy this philosophy, the Kaizen's methodology has structured and efficient events that seek to meet exactly this condition: the constancy in adopting practices and procedures that are even more sustainable to the sector.

The Challenges of Lean Office

Lean management of information is very important because many organizations neglect how that information is handled or managed. In this sense, the challenges of Lean Office are listed below:

• Simplify each process to minimize the need for information management;
• Program each value stream only from one point to facilitate information management across all operations;
• Use a production control for flows in the chain of operations;
• Send information in small batches;
• Management must be transparent and intuitive.

To compose the flow of value in administrative areas we must consider that there are some difficulties, for example:

• Data for collection are limited;
• Difficulty identifying waste;
• Difficulty in differentiating a waste from an activity that does not add value.

Lean Office example

A good Lean Office application example is in Bosch, which applies the methodology very well in its administrative environments.

At Bosch, value stream mapping evidenced the existence of countless wastes, such as information going back and forth between sales, engineering, production, procurement, and other areas.

The company used techniques such as the reduction in time to perform repetitive activities through the use of a database and the creation of work cells to make the flow continuous and non-stop.

Another example is Alcoa, which makes use of its ABS (Alcoa Business System). It is considered one of the most successful companies in the world in the application of the methodology derived from the Toyota Production System in offices.

It is worth mentioning that the HR department of service companies uses the Lean Office to generate gains such as reduction of waste in the processes of purchase of transport and ticket vouchers, increase of assertiveness of hiring, generating a lower percentage of voluntary dismissal in the period of experience, reduction of time for vacancies of assistants and analysts.

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