Lean Office

     This article aims to provide a literature review of the most important forms of waste in offices and to present the methods that can be applied in the administrative environment to transform offices into “lean offices”. Several lean tools and concepts used on the shop floor have been adopted and implemented in administrative environments. It is important that administrative areas work in an integrated way and in tune with the manufacturing area, since they are connected and interdependent.
       
1. WASTE IN OFFICES

        The idea of also making administrative processes lean has been gaining acceptance among companies in Brazil and around the world. However, migrating these concepts from the factory to the office is not that simple. It is easier to identify waste when raw materials and physical or chemical transformation processes are involved. In the administrative area, most activities concern the generation of information, which makes identifying waste difficult, since visualizing the processing of something intangible such as information is far more complicated.
        In the office, what is inventory? Can it be defined as the reports produced and left sitting for days on computers waiting for some analysis? What are defects? Rework and incorrectly recorded data? A stopped machine or a shortage of raw material in a factory causes waste and is seen immediately, but in the office this situation is not always visible. According to Lareau (2002), waste in administrative processes is classified as follows:

. Goal alignment: the energy spent by people working toward poorly understood goals and the effort required to correct the problem and produce the expected result;
. Assignment: the effort used to complete an inappropriate and unnecessary task;
. Waiting: the resource lost while people wait for information, meetings, signatures, a returned call, and so on;
. Motion: the effort lost in unnecessary movement;
. Processing: work not performed in the best way is processing waste;
. Control: the energy used to control and monitor that produces no improvement in performance;
. Variability: resources used to compensate for or correct results that vary from what was expected;
. Tampering: the effort used to arbitrarily change a process without knowing all the consequences, and the subsequent efforts to compensate for the unexpected consequences;
. Strategy: the value lost by implementing processes that satisfy short-term goals but add no value for customers and investors;
. Reliability: the effort required to correct unpredictable results due to unknown causes;
. Standardization: the energy spent because work was not done in the best possible way by everyone responsible;
. Suboptimization: caused by two processes competing with each other; in the best case the waste will be duplicated work, but it can go as far as compromising both processes and degrading the final result;
.  Scheduling: poor use of time slots and schedules;
. Informal processes: occur when resources are used to create and maintain informal processes that replace the official processes or that conflict with other  informal processes, as well as the resources used to correct the errors caused by this system;
. Uneven flow: resources invested in materials or information that accumulate between workstations and create the waste of uneven flow;
. Unnecessary checks: the effort used for inspections and rework;
. Errors: caused by the efforts needed to redo work that could not be used;
. Translation: the effort required to change data, formats and reports between the steps of a process or those responsible for them;
. Missing information: occurs when resources are required to repair or compensate for the consequences of a lack of key information;
. Lack of integration: the effort required to transfer information (or materials) within an organization (departments or groups) that are not fully integrated into the chain of processes used;
. Irrelevance: efforts employed to deal with unnecessary information or efforts to fix the problems it causes;
. Inaccuracy: the effort used to create incorrect information or to deal with its consequences;
. Inventory: all resources applied to a service before it is required, all materials not being used, and all materials that are already finished and ready to be delivered and are waiting;
. Secondary processes: the resources expended on secondary processes that cannot yet be used by the subsequent steps of the process;
. Underutilized assets: equipment and buildings that are not being used to the fullest;
. Transportation: all transportation of materials and information, except that used to deliver products and services to customers;
. Lack of focus: occurs whenever an employee’s energy and attention are not directed toward the organization’s critical goals;
. Structure: happens when existing behaviors, expectations, procedures, rituals, regulations, positions and priorities are not reinforcing, guiding and orienting the best behavior for reducing waste, and also when there is a large gap between the company’s organizational structure and the fundamental elements found in world-class organizations;
. Discipline: occurs whenever there is a failure in the system for accurate identification of and quick reaction to negligence, lack of responsibility and problems related to the discipline expected of employees;
. Mastery: occurs whenever an opportunity to increase an employee’s mastery over his or her work area is not taken;
Identifying waste is not the only difficulty. Methods for increasing efficiency are often not seen as very normal by administrative staff. Standardization, for example, is a problem, since specialists state that it is possible to define the exact way and time to perform any repetitive task, and that such tasks can be done in a safer and more efficient way. The problem is that office employees tend to believe that their work, unlike that of factory workers, is not tied to a daily routine or to any kind of standardization or predetermined standard.   

2. METHODS APPLIED FOR THE LEAN TRANSFORMATION OF OFFICES

Making an office lean by eliminating waste in the administrative environment can follow strategies similar to those used for transformation in production. Process improvement happens through activities that identify problems and waste, eliminate them, and measure and evaluate the change. There is no step-by-step recipe for making an office lean overnight, since each company may follow a different path to reach its desired future state. We present the models, concepts and tools frequently used in factories that can be carried over to the administrative environment:

2.1. 5S. A tool with great potential for use in offices for process improvement, based on five Japanese words beginning with the letter S (SEIRI, SEITON, SEISO, SEIKETSU, SHITSUKE), whose goal is to create a workspace that enables visual control and lean execution of tasks. With its application, the workspace will be standardized, waste will be reduced and workers will have greater control over the space and the activities performed.

2.2. Value Stream Mapping (VSM). It is a fundamental tool that diagrams the flow of material and information. The big difference in administrative environments lies in the near impossibility of distinguishing the flow of materials from the flow of information. VSM adapted to the administrative environment focuses on the flow of information and helps plan and link lean initiatives in order to reach the planned future state through the systematic capture and analysis of data, resulting in cost reduction through the elimination of waste and the creation of smooth flows of information and work (Tapping and Shuker (2003), Picchi (2002))

2.3. Continuous Flow. It is a concept that allows the unit of work to flow between process steps without stopping between them and, therefore, without the need for transportation and inventory. Work cells consist of arranging the people needed for a service by placing them close to one another, in the sequence of the activities to be performed. The advantage lies in reducing the time, space and resources spent on transportation between activities, speeding up the process and thereby increasing its productivity. The Operator Balance Chart is a visual tool that shows the work elements, the time available for performing them and the staff employed, and it is used to reveal improvement opportunities through the relationship between the time used for each task, the total cycle time and the takt time. FIFO lanes (First In – First Out) establish that all tasks must be processed in the order in which they enter the flow (Tapping and Shuker, 2003).

2.4. Takt Time. It is the time determined by customer demand and is therefore the pace imposed on the workflow by that demand. To calculate it for a given value stream, simply divide the number of daily working hours by the total units of work required for one day, deducting breaks for meetings, lunch, etc. There is no exact formula for determining customer demand for administrative activities, and the unit of work is not always measurable as it is in manufacturing, so it is necessary to rely on historical data, develop techniques for collecting this data, and define a unit of work that can be associated with a processing time (Picchi, 2002). Pitch is used when it is not practical for some activities in the flow to move one unit of work according to takt time, and so it is used to determine the ideal amount of work, or batch, to be moved. Pitch is a multiple of takt time that allows the creation and sustainment of a consistent and practical workflow for the unit of work to move from the beginning to the end of the process through the value stream, maintaining a continuous and smooth pace; the occurrence of any problem is quickly identified, because pitch allows production to be tracked at short time intervals, preventing problems and errors from piling up until the end of the period (Picchi, 2002).

2.5. Standardized Work. It is a concept that means establishing and documenting the procedure that delivers the best result, with the best method and the best sequence of activities. Standardizing tasks is an important tool for identifying problems in administrative environments, creating an efficient sequence for the flow of activities, minimizing variations in procedures, establishing best practices to maintain service quality, and enabling simple training of staff, so that one person is able to perform more than one service, giving the flow greater flexibility. One should seek to reduce the number of steps when standardizing a process, analyzing the value stream to highlight unnecessary activities and the waste inherent in them (Picchi, 2002; Tapping and Shuker, 2003).

2.6. Pull systems. In the administrative environment it is necessary to know the downstream processes well and what happens downstream so that the service is performed and its result is available at the right moment, neither before nor after. The shift to pull production brings advantages such as: shorter processing time, less work in process (piles of paper on desks), reduced inventory and queues, less transportation of units of work, reorganization of the work environment with fewer process steps and fewer people involved, leveled scheduling, greater control of production and of problem identification, greater flexibility to respond to changes in demand, etc. Supermarkets are used when there are obstacles in the process where units of work can be moved one at a time while others work in batches, or when there is variation in cycle time between two activities (Picchi, 2002; Tapping and Shuker, 2003).

2.7. Heijunka (Leveling). It is a physical device used to control the volume and variety of service within a certain period. It consists of a box with slots, each of which represents a pitch increment at which the unit of work must be transferred to the next activity. The goal is to level the workload so that people and resources are used in the best possible way, while also serving as an information center about what is happening in the flow (Tapping and Shuker, 2003).

3. CONCLUSION

The lean tools used in production are being successfully applied in offices. The review carried out in this article was not intended to define an implementation standard. The effort to reduce waste within offices is neither that simple nor that obvious, but with effort and dedication in applying the methods presented it becomes clear that the results to be reaped are very positive.
However, it is not enough to focus only on a few areas, since the company must be transformed as a whole. For the company’s transformation to succeed, people must be continuously looking for ways to improve processes. Cultivating an environment for creating new kaizen through recognition of the team’s effort is important in the pursuit of perfection.

Want to implement Lean Office in a structured way and with tangible results? Talk to our specialists and find out how our services consulting can transform administrative routines into more agile, efficient and sustainable processes.

REFERENCES

HINES, P.; TAYLOR, D. Going Lean. A guide to implementation. Lean Enterprise Research Center: Cardiff, UK, 2000.
LAREAU, W. Office Kaizen: transforming office operations into a strategic competitive advantage. USA:ASQ Quality Press, 2002.
PICCHI, F.A. Lean na Administração. In: LEAN SUMMIT 2002, Gramado, RS, 17-19 nov. Apresentações. Gramado: Lean Institute Brasil, 2002.
TAPPING, D.; SHUKER, T. Value stream management for the lean office: 8 steps to planning, mapping, and sustaining lean improvements in administrative areas. USA:Productivity Press, 2003.
WOMACK, J.P.; JONES, D.T.; ROOS, D. A Máquina que mudou o mundo. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 1992.
WOMACK, J.P.; JONES, D.T. A mentalidade enxuta nas empresas - elimine o desperdício e crie riqueza. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 2004.