"We have successfully used Lean in manufacturing and the supply chain, and we recognized there was a wealth of opportunity beyond the manufacturing floor for the application of lean. We wanted to find someone who had an experience base with business support processes to bring lean to that audience of our company. Shelley provided us that credible source. She brought numerous examples from her experience about how lean principles and tools apply to office and service operations, and helped translate employee questions to show them how the principles applied to what they do."

Jesse Shearin
Director of Enterprise Excellence
PPG Industries Inc.

Case Study:

When it’s Time to Scale to Meet Market Demand

Article:

The Secret Weapons that Lean Provides for BPM

Services

Kaizen Burst for Office, Service, and Technical Operations

Business Need

Today, enormous amounts of waste exist in office and service operations. Delays, bottlenecks, errors, redundancy, work arounds, and ambiguity abound. Activities that deliver virtually no value can account for as much as 95 percent of the workday.

A methodology that can eliminate waste and increase speed has been used by Toyota for years. James Womack and Daniel Jones studied the Toyota Production System (TPS) and coined the term “lean” for this method in their book The Machine That Changed the World. Now organizations are applying these lean tools to service and office settings with great success. Typical results show dramatic reductions in time while significantly boosting quality.

Ideas and Involvement

In this engagement we use TPS principles, concepts, and tools in YOUR service, office, or technical environment. We work with up to 3 teams of your best managers and employees to understand the current work process, observe it, analyze it, complete swim lane value stream mapping and then improve your processes. Our proven methodology energizes and leads the teams to inventive ideas that really get implemented in the work place.

Implementation and Impact

We study and immediately apply the tools to improve your process. We start implementing on the third day of the week! The team leaves with implemented results and a short plan to implement additional improvements which take a bit longer. Team and Sponsor involvement and commitment guarantees successful implementation.

Length: 4-5 days

Tool Example: Visual Management: Employees develop visual tools. The magazine rack in the photo puts orders in a first in first out (FIFO) sequence, and helps teams manage the orders to meet customer demand.

Major Steps

Getting Ready:

Identify critical processes that are broken
Select sponsor, project lead, internal consultant and team members for each process (up to 3 teams)
Develop a high level value stream map for each process
Identify vision and improvement targets for each process

Kaizen Event (4-5 days)

Senior management kickoff
Definition of the need, vision, and improvement targets for each process
Lean Overview and 8 wastes
Lean Simulation
Waste Walk
Value Stream maps for each process
Data gathering for the current state
Use of lean tools to analyze the current process and determine gaps
Design improvements
Implement quick hits during working session
Identify ideal state
15 design principles for improving your process
Redesign the processes
Review with senior management
Engage employees
Develop implementation plan – first week, and weeks 2-6
Celebrate team’s success

Unique Value:

Work on critical work processes and make improvements in the 4-5 day workshop and the next 6 weeks. You will see immediate results
Build knowledge and interaction from end to end on a process
Product dramatic business results, such as
Reducing paperwork process time up to 90%
Improving on-time performance up to 90%
Reducing errors up to 50%

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