Lean Office Kaizen is The Path to a Timely-Cost-ffective Administration

“Time is an equal opportunity employer.  Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day.  Rich people can’t buy more hours.  Scientists can’t invent new minutes.  And you can’t save time to spend it on another day.  Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving.  No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

                   -Denis Waitley

“Time is making fools of us again.”

                   -J.K. Rowling

Time is the most important commodity in the world.  In the business world, technology has vastly improved processes to the point that we often feel that we can sit back and let technology do the work. We think that technology saves us time and energy.  Technology can do processes for us (save our energy), but not actually save us time.  With all these new and improved processes, work is much more complicated, and many companies have lost sight of the basic idea of time. 

What is Really Inside?

Today’s modern offices appear to be streamlined and efficient but look past the seemingly sleek exterior and what do you find?  Cluttered back rooms full of boxes holding old files, a closet full of disorganized and hard-to-find office supplies, obsolete and broken equipment, and office layouts that are a maze of cubicles which are obstacles in the path of the flow of the paperwork.  The flow of paperwork is what suffers the most in a disorganized office.

Step back and look at your company’s offices with a critical eye.  What do you see?

          -Complicated office layouts.
          -Customer orders taking too long to be filled.
          -Full in-baskets that never get emptied in a day.
          -Poorly planned meetings.
          -Teams with incomplete or no direction.
          -Duplication of work.
          -Proposals not completed in time for the bid.
          -Payments not made on time.
          -Extra signatures needed that hold up completion.
          -Documents that are unnecessarily handled many times by too many workers.

Can you answer “true” to any of these questions:

-Does your paperwork or phone calls get misplaced or lost before being resolved?

-When trying to improve a process or procedure, does it usually fail and the workers become demotivated?
-Do you often hear, “This is the way we have always done it so why change?”?
-Is your department held hostage by the company’s computer system?
-Do you not have enough time to meet deadlines?
-When someone comes up with a good idea for an improvement, does it get shot down?

If the answer is “true” to at least one of these questions, then Lean Office Kaizen is the solution.   Lean Office Kaizen can break through all of the “time-wasters” and increase productivity while improving the workflow and enhancing the motivation and attitude of all involved.  Lean Office Kaizen focuses on eliminating waste. Waste is defined as the result of non-value-added activities.

A Non-value-added activity is an action that does not contribute to the creation or transformation of the product or service that the final customer is willing to pay for or which is necessary to complete the product or service.  For example, if a customer’s order needs to go to three different departments and takes many days to process because of this, we can say this slowdown is non-value-added.  The customer does not want to pay for the additional processing or wait the additional time for the product.

The concepts of Lean are tried and tested throughout industry with considerable success.  These concepts can be applied to any business process or service.  They increase office productivity by improving the administrative support and customer service functions which add value to every product or service.

Lean Office Kaizen is a total package that consists of "the Path," "the Philosophy," and "the Leadership Structure," all concepts that are necessary for success.  Lean Office Kaizen provides the tools for implementation that you can customize for your own Company or Organization, by helping to create micro-processes using a hands-on approach. 

A Lean Culture creates “buy-in” for the workers because it teaches them to use their knowledge and creativity for improvement. It promotes team efforts and individual involvement to reach goals.  Management should encourage these ideas because they are vital to the success of the project.  After all, who would know better what improvements should be made than the workers who do the process every day?

Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning “little improvement.”  It means taking small steps to a larger goal.  Taking one process or procedure and breaking it down into “small steps” and looking at each step objectively are the beginnings of a kaizen.  By doing this analysis, you will be able to see which steps can be eliminated and which steps can be improved for a result of a better workflow.

Implementing a Lean Office Kaizen

It requires every participant to be very hands-on and involved in all aspects of the process.  This process involves rules:

            -Everyone should keep an open mind to new ideas.
          -Positive attitudes are a must!
          -No excuses, only solutions.
          -Ask Why?  Then ask it again, and again, and again.
          -Don’t think too hard – just do.  Be action minded and learn from the mistakes.
          -Take advantage of everyone’s expertise and knowledge.
          -Leave the titles outside – everyone is equal and should have no fear of contributing their ideas.

                   From “The Kaizen Blitz”

Combining Kaizen Events with Lean principles reduces costs and improves quality.  This philosophy empowers everyone in the company to make their own improvements (kaizens).  The Lean Culture increases communication at all levels of the company by mutual motivation and support.

          -“Doing the task and doing the task better, become one and the same thing.”
                   John Shook – “Learning to See”

Why is it so difficult for offices to improve their processes?  What are some of the obstacles administrators come up against when trying to implement better practices?  A few of the common comments are:

          -We are not familiar with the tools that can help us.
          -I don’t have that responsibility – it’s not my job.
          -No one feels motivated to change.
          -We do not feel empowered to take any action.
          -This department is too busy because…
          -We just can’t seem to communicate well to other areas.

If these excuses sound familiar, you are not alone.  However, many companies and organizations have overcome these objections, educated their personnel, and implemented Lean techniques and tools to bring their offices up to the competitive level of their world-class peers.

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