Lean in the office: the waste that nobody sees
Lean was born in factories, but it's in offices where the most time is lost today. Chain approvals, repeated emails, and reports that nobody reads.
Lean was born in factories, but it's in offices where the most time is lost today. Chain approvals, repeated emails, and reports that nobody reads.
What is waste in an office
In a factory, you see accumulated stock and idle machines. In an office, waste is invisible: processes with eight approvals, information requested twice, meetings without decisions. In a recent project, we measured that a simple purchase request passed through eleven people and took 19 days.
How to measure
The first step is to follow a process from start to finish, with a stopwatch, and record how much time is spent working and how much time is spent waiting. Normally, effective work is less than 10% of the total time.
Typical gains
By eliminating non-value steps and defining clear approval limits, it is common to reduce lead times by half and free up 20% of the teams' time for work that really matters.
If this topic is relevant to your company, talk to us. An initial conversation helps to understand where to start.
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