Lean Office: Get People Involved in Change

Lean Office: Get People Involved in Change
Events/Learning: Best Practices from AME Educational Events

Easy steps for engaging and involving the office in process improvements.

Lea A.P. Tonkin, editor in chief

Does your lean thinking extend to administrative and services areas? If not, start looking for untapped improvement potential beyond the shop floor.

“When people argue that lean doesn’t apply in the office, they need to get over their belief that, ‘We’re different.’ The question becomes, ‘How can we adapt lean to best meet our needs?’ Although the value streams in offices may not be as visible as in the plant, it’s really all about processes and systems,” said Drew Locher of Change Management Associates and author of Lean Office and Service Simplified; The Definitive How-To Guide (CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, A Productivity Press book, New York, 2011). He recently facilitated an AME workshop, “Lean Office & Service Simplified” in Hunt Valley, MD. The educational event included a plant tour at Hunt Valley’s MarquipWardUnited, a manufacturer of machinery and controls for the corrugated paperboard and folding carton industries.
 

MarquipWardUnited tour guides during the recent AME workshop, “Lean Office & Service Simplified.”

Understanding the Current State
As a starting point, Locher suggested identifying and mapping value streams. Every office or administrative department has internal and/or external customers and suppliers. Value stream maps clearly show the sequence of activities, the pathways of flow, and the linkages between customers and suppliers.

“Get people involved and engaged in change from the beginning,” Locher said. “Encourage them to go through a discovery process so they can learn for themselves. Creating a current state value stream map is one way of doing this. Another way is for people to track how they spend their time for a week or longer. This will help people understand how much of their time is spent on non-value-adding (NVA) activities. This will confirm for them the opportunities that exist.”

Office staff may be surprised how much waste they uncover, according to Locher. For example, they waste time tracking down missing data or correcting faulty records. “It is not that people intentionally pass on incomplete or incorrect information. It occurs mainly due to the lack of awareness about the needs of subsequent people in the process (internal customers),” said Locher. “Traditional organizational structure generally impedes communication as well as information and process flow. It causes multiple or redundant handoffs and fosters parochial priority conflicts. All of this can worsen quality performance.”

Improving the Process
“Through mapping, people learn that they are part of a value chain,” he continued. “The next step is to create a future state map that addresses the key issues uncovered in the current state. Most often the initial focus is to improve the information quality, which in turn will improve flow. This is accomplished by developing ‘standard work.’

“An office team can identify three or four critical tasks, and see how others do similar work,” Locher said. “They begin to create standard work that everyone will follow.” (See “Purposes of Standard Work.”)
Standard work will improve information quality and add much-needed stability to any process, according to Locher. “The key here is to involve the people who perform the activities in the process of creating standard work,” he said. “It represents another ‘discovery’ opportunity. Invariably, steps that can be eliminated or streamlined are identified during the process of creating standard work. In other words, don’t just document what you do, improve it first.”

Standard work elements include:

• What — groupings of specific steps in the desired sequence
• Key points — the “how and why” (to ensure quality, efficiency, safety)
• Time — (how long a step or activity should take) and timing (when a step or activity needs to occur).

“If they do one or two improvement events a month, they’ll get better at it,” Locher said. “This collaborative effort will take time. Change doesn’t happen overnight. But in 30 days, a project team will have learned how to create and improve standard work in their area.”

Flow
Once stability has been achieved, information and service flow will improve. The team may want to pursue additional improvement opportunities. They identify activities in a particular process and the demand rate for each activity. “There may be bottlenecks in the existing process where demand exceeds capacity at times,” said Locher. “These must be addressed.”

Next, the team determines the resources required to meet demand. If they uncover a bottleneck, they consider additional changes. “Perhaps a particular activity or step is better performed by someone else, or more streamlining is possible,” Locher said. “Ultimately, the team will identify standard process roles and responsibilities in a way to ensure that demand can be met. Then they provide requisite training and cross-training in order for people to successfully fulfill the roles expected of them.”

As office teams learn to streamline their processes, they create smoother workflow. “However, sometimes more is needed to ensure steady flow over time,” Locher said. “This is where ‘level pull systems’ can help. People in the office can be ‘pulled’ on occasion to help in a particular area, such as when a temporary bottleneck arises. Clear rules are established to trigger this, and more cross-training is usually necessary. Ideally members of the office team can make the appropriate decisions here on their own. In turn, level pull simplifies day-to-day or hour-by-hour management, provides greater leadtime predictability, improves resource utilization through better flexibility, and creates a more satisfying work environment.”

Make Things Visual
Locher suggested that office lean teams visually display their standard work as part of a comprehensive visual management system (VMS). A VMS goes beyond simply posting performance measures in the area. (See “Great Questions.”)

Posting the rules of the pull system is another element. Members of the office team must participate in the VMS development. “This is the only way to gain buy-in to this critical component of any lean management system,” said Locher. “In general, people will resist increasing visibility and transparency, if they do not understand its purpose. Once they do understand, they gain a greater sense of belonging, pride, and accountability. Their frustration decreases, and there’s a greater likelihood that they will sustain standard work.”

Nothing Remains the Same
One of the common misconceptions is that, once a team defines and implements standard work, it stays the same forever. “People need to understand that standard work will change. After all, lean is really about continuous improvement,” Locher said. “Nothing is cast in stone. Try a change for 30 days and then evaluate if you need to revamp your process.

“However, there is a way of doing it properly, by involving co-workers, fully evaluating the proposed change, and then implementing the agreed-upon change consistently throughout,” he added. “The improper way is to drift into change where people on their own decide what works best for them.”

Reduced learning curves, productivity and efficiency gains, and better customer service/satisfaction typically result from office lean implementation. Locher said long-term improvements result from small, daily process tweaks.
“Find ways to make change manageable, visible, and measurable,” Locher said. “Continue with an implementation plan, with a list of things that you need to improve. Daily or weekly huddles keep improvement first and foremost in people’s minds. Share what you learn with others in your area, with leadership, and with other functions. A lunch and walk-through program helps people in an organization learn about each other’s progress.” Communication boards, newsletters, etc. also offer opportunities for sharing progress updates.

Leader Standard Work
Leaders provide critical support for office lean initiatives. “They must show interest in the efforts of the teams, provide support where necessary, follow up on whether standard work is being sustained, and recognize their improvements,” Locher said. “Leaders are supposed to drive continuous improvement. They should spend time at the gemba to understand current conditions and help identify opportunities for improvement. This will be made greatly easier with the use of the visual management system previously mentioned. They can also teach others about problem-solving and other lean skills.”

MarquipWardUnited: Buy-in and Results
Leadership needs to encourage and recognize improvements in the office as well as production areas, said Joe Malone, L3 team leader at MarquipWardUnited. (L3 is parent firm Barry-Wehmiller’s philosophy of continuous improvement, passion for people, communication, and shared partnership). Malone emphasized the importance of effective communications in nurturing a continuous improvement culture.1

Daily “touch” meetings offer a great opportunity for sharing performance updates and goals, and for building camaraderie, Malone said. “We’re over the hurdle of gaining buy-in at our touch meetings. Openly and respectfully, we talk about good news (work and personal), recognition, and any improvement opportunities that will help us leave the facility feeling fulfilled,” he said.

“It’s like a pyramid effect,” Malone said. “Teammates in all areas, from the service team to our stockroom associates, share issues, performance updates, and ideas.” Needed updates reach leadership by 9 a.m. daily. These communications also support the company’s hoshin (policy deployment) process, which have been in place for three years.

“Daily communication helps us understand who’s working on one process or another,” Malone said. “For example, our accounting department implemented a number of process improvements. A couple of years ago during the recession, we had no layoffs, but four out of eight people in our accounting department took early retirement. We got creative, using A3s (problem-solving activities) to develop cross-training and other strategies. As a result of these office improvements, daily and weekly priorities are listed on a visual board.” Although the department improved its performance in several metrics such as accounts receivable over 60 days and accounts payable first pass yield, opportunities such as accounts receivable and invoice automation remain.

Sometimes the need for change is obvious. Malone cited a previous machine quoting process that ballooned to three weeks, for a machine with an eight-week build cycle. “We created process maps to understand our quoting process,” Malone said. “Value stream mapping brings understanding about existing processes. You need to understand your process and identify improvement opportunities before you can fix it.

“From there, we brainstormed and came up with a list of our top ideas for improving the process (such as duplicate or unnecessary forms and lack of any flow),” Malone said. “We worked on A3 problem-solving, then implemented the needed improvements such as consolidating and eliminating forms and creating a heijunka (level loading) board. The results of these process improvements allow our sales executives to quote the majority of our machines in 24 hours, with none lingering greater than five days since the event was performed in 2006.”

Track Performance
“For each one of our machines selling in excess of $1 million, there are many processes to execute successfully such as procurement, engineering, etc. We look at how we are progressing with these processes every morning. Performance in these areas affects other processes or our customers,” Malone said. “For example, we had kaizen (improvement) events on our process of taking orders and structuring them into BOMs (bills of material). We looked at our current-state and future-state maps, and tried to accomplish improvements within 90 days. Some improvement activities take longer than that, which is OK. Making these opportunities visible is the most important aspect of any lean event.”

Monthly metrics track safety, on-time performance, financials, inventory, associate retention, and other factors. Malone said such updates reflect performance by everyone in the plant, including leadership. “One area we recently improved was associate reviews,” Malone said. “We were only 15 percent on time completing them; now we’re up to 80 percent. We also continue to focus on innovation (new product development).We absolutely need a minimum of 20 percent of what we make to be new products.”

Project teams create an A3 sheet for every improvement event. “We document what was done, and we make the learning available to others,” Malone said. “We need to continue encouraging improvements, and a positive environment, for all of the 330 people who work here.”

Footnote
1. The article, “Shared Trust and People-Centric Leadership; Barry-Wehmiller’s PCMC in Green Bay, WI,” by Lea A.P. Tonkin, appeared in the Target Fourth issue, 2010, pp. 12-18.