Increase Personal Productivity

Lean office is becoming a popular concept every day but what does it really mean?

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For me, Lean office delivers significant improvement in productivity, improved customer service, cost effectiveness through waste elimination and optimized utilization of office and administrative environments – such as man power available, IT, finance, procurement and a proper program management.

Since one of the key principles of lean thinking is to minimize the time between the customer order and the fulfillment of the order keeping in mind the lead time available. Most lean office initiatives are concerned exclusively with making value stream maps and creating a more efficient business process. That’s only part of the solution, but no matter how lean the system, if the people who work within it are inefficient, you’ll still have waste. It’s like relay race, you can make the baton hand off nice and clean, but if the runners are slow, they are going to slow. 

The key to lean office is improving the efficiency first:

If you are losing money due to wasted effort and low productivity of knowledge workers, your office inefficiently leading to low work morale, and high workforce turnover. Dis organised office practices leads to irritating customers and losing customer base. In order to plug the waste we must map this issue first.

A boundary less Office’ is where cross-functional team members are located in close proximity without physical barriers which encourages seamless and direct communication and intense collaboration.  Office was responsible for performing time critical task. Work arrived before staff arrived at work but had to be completed on the day it arrived and sent out. Staff could not go home until the work for the day was completes.

Lean techniques are commonplace in world class manufacturing organisations and help them drive year on year improvements to quality delivery and cost. These techniques are increasingly applied in office environments with amazing results. Yes, the claims about performance are really true. Whenever I have used lean techniques in an office I have never failed to get over 20% performance improvements and usually much more than this.

We can then look at everything that happens in the office and ask ourselves the question,

“Is this what I am really here to do?”

If the answer is “yes” and what you are doing is actually directly useful for your customer then do more of it.

You spent a lot of time making sure that the Focused Office identifies who the real customer is and what you do for them. Adding value is everything you do that the customer wants you to do; everything else is waste. Eliminating or reducing waste means that more time is available to do something for your customer and will always result in an improved performance. An efficient office is an insurance for better compensation on your investments. 

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