A big problem when the massive production started at the Toyota Facility in Nagoya was the amount of space the operations were demanding... Hundreds of parts finished by one workstation were accumulated in between that and the next workstation so to assure there will be no starvation of parts. Same thing was happening with external supplies.
One day -the story goes- one of the Japanese from Toyota happened to be in a Safeway Supermarket in New York. He was amazed seeing how the amounts of products were barely sufficient to fill up the shelves, and there was no "Warehouse". This was a revelation along with the fact that many people -not employees of the supermarket- were working at refilling the shelves, these were employees of the external suppliers.
The Toyota Supermarket
Today we see this happening at every self-service store. Just in Time deliveries by a committed supply chain make sure the workstations will not have to stop due to lack of materials or parts.
Applied to administrative processes, this is a fast paced process that continuously moves the information or documents. They will hold them just as long as necessary to produce their part of the process, passing it immediately to the next operation. The flow can be reduced in time to small fractions of the traditional time. Processes that were taking 2 weeks are today being completed in 1 or 2 days. Papers do not rest in trays, but are handed immediately to the person in charge of the next transaction, so the process is completed quickly. Each person making sure they are not giving the next person more work than they can immediately process.
When we start doing this, we will be discovering some "Bottle-necks" or stations with complex and time-comsuming operations. These are an opportunity to bring equilibrium by leveling the workloads. In most cases we require to develop training so people can help each other. This is called "cross-training" and can reach a point where all the individuals in a process can easily exchange operations, making their jobs less boresome and more fulfilling. This helps develop deeper understanding of the process and the people in it.
We will measure here Touch Time, meaning the time that a person really is contributing to the transformation of the product, in this case the product may be an administrative procedure: Issuance of awork order, an invoice, quote, purchase order, etc. Making sure it is processed Just In Time...
