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Improve Efficiency with Lean Office
- Losing money due to wasted effort and low productivity of your knowledge workers?
- Office inefficiency leading to low worker morale and high turnover?
- Customers lost or irritated due to disorganized office practices?
 Applying Lean principles to your office operations can solve these problems and create efficient knowledge workers that are a real competitive advantage.
Given the success that Lean Manufacturing has shown in cleaning up production processes, why not achieve a Lean Enterprise by driving Lean Office practices into the front office where inefficient procedures, paperwork and bureaucracy in one area can stall the leanest efforts of other operations?
Thanks to TechHelp's Lean Office Expert,Erwin Schwiebert, a growing number of Idaho organizations are using the principles of Lean to reduce inefficiency and waste in the office while providing a more satisfying environment for the workforce.
Schwiebert emphasizes that Lean is not about cutting staff and resources. Instead, it is about:
- Focusing people’s efforts creating value for the customer and eliminating waste.
- Speeding up the operation by eliminating idle time created by paperwork and bureaucracy.
In an office environment, the customer could be a consumer purchasing a product, a citizen receiving a service or another department or operation within the same organization. The primary goal of Lean is improved customer service. By working to eliminate "waste" that is not valued by the customer, we are better able to provide exactly what the customer wants, when the customer wants it and in the way the customer wants it.
Schwiebert says he can pretty much boil office waste down into two areas; wasted activities and wasted time. "Too often, we look at HOW to get things done better or faster in the office instead of examining WHAT things we really ought to be doing," says Schwiebert. "It is common for offices to spend a lot of money on efficiency and automation that leads them to doing the wrong things a bit faster or automating bad processes." Schwiebert breaks the Lean Office process down as follows:
- Engage the entire office team - especially top management and line workers. For Lean to succeed, we need the complete support (financial, time and spirit) of senior management and the buy-in and feedback of the workforce, who often have the best knowledge of what is really happening "in the trenches."
- Use Process Mapping (PM) to map out current processes, information flows and paper flows.
- Use the Current State Map to identify waste (time & activities) and to determine what we really need to capture from the current process.
- Build a Future State Map that identifies WHAT the office should be doing and use the FSM to guide the creation of waste free processes and information flows.
- Only now do we determine HOW to build our processes.
- Execute the plan and build in a mechanism for and a culture of continuous improvement.
The Schwiebert Group worked with TechHelp during much of 2006 to take the proven and successful principles of Lean philosophy and create a body of knowledge and training activities that would resonate with knowledge workers. After refining the product during a series of beta tests, Schweibert began working with Idaho private sector and state agencies to Lean out their operations. The success of these early projects led Erwin Schwiebert to formally join the TechHelp team as a Lean specialist in January of 2006.
Schwiebert is available to work with individual agencies and companies on Lean education and implementation. He conducts public workshops that help participants learn how to identify office wastes and gives them tools for reducing those wastes.
Schwiebert recently implemented Lean Office with two Idaho government agencies that were so pleased with the results that they engaged him for additional work. Several private sector firms have also decided to add Lean Office to their overall Lean Enterprise transformations.
Learn More About Erwin Here or Contact Erwin at:
Tel - 208-426-5930
Cell - 208-859-4334
Email - erwinschwiebert@boisestate.edu
How Lean Are You? Try Our Lean Score Card!
Read the Business Week Article on the Extreme Lean Revolution
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