Operational Excellence in Your Office

A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques

Kevin J. Duggan, Tim Healey

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367480073
• eBook ISBN: 9781315360737
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Operational Excellence is achieved when all employees in your organization can see the flow of value to your customers and can make adjustments to that flow before it breaks down. Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques presents nine time-tested guidelines for designing business process flow that enable Operational Excellence in the office. Each chapter describes one guideline by using text, illustrations, and practical examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of why creating flow in the office is essential and how to achieve it.

Accounting for the reality that most office employees are required to work on many different projects throughout the day, this book details a step-by-step methodology for leveraging traditional value stream flow to establish Operational Excellence in an office environment. In addition, it describes a more advanced form of flow called "self-healing" flow—in which employees are capable of identifying and fixing problems with the flow without requiring management intervention.

Explaining how to achieve Operational Excellence and self-healing flow with the nine guidelines, the book also introduces new concepts such as part-time continuous flow processing cells, workflow cycles, takt capability, integration events, pitch in the office, and ways to tell whether your office is on time.

With this book, you will be able to take the knowledge provided and immediately apply it by following the step-by-step checklists included at the end of each chapter. In addition to the lists of action items for implementing each guideline, the book includes "acid tests" you can use to determine if you have implemented each guideline correctly.

When finished, you will have designed an end-to-end flow for the services in your office as well as visual systems to help employees distinguish normal flow from abnormal flow so they can fix flow problems on their own, before they negatively impact your customers.

part

one

Getting Started

chapter
one

Operational Excellence in the Office

Throughout the years, many different ways to improve the office have been developed, most of them typically focused on project management software, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, database improvements, new computer systems, and, lately, using Lean techniques in the office in order to eliminate waste. Operational Excellence, however, is different from these methods right from the very first step, which is focused on designing how the office should operate and function day in and day out.

To do this, we design how information will flow through the office from when a request for a service is initialized, through all of the activities required to process the request, and on to when the service is delivered to the customer. Principles and guidelines are used to design this flow of information correctly and in a way that enables the on-time delivery of the service to the customer in a repeatable manner.

When flow is designed using the principles and guidelines of Operational Excellence, it results in an office where information flows from activity to activity along fixed pathways at preset, predefined times. Everyone knows what to work on next from the designed flow, not from managers setting priorities and making decisions. Everyone in the office knows where they get their work from, when to expect the information they need, and when to send their completed work to the next activity in the flow. The design guidelines also describe how information will ultimately be delivered to the customer, how we will respond to the customer, and, most importantly, create a guaranteed turnaround time for when the service will be delivered to the customer once it has been requested each and every time.

While these are the immediate results of designing an office based on the principles and guidelines of Operational Excellence, the true intent of applying the design guidelines is much deeper. Designing how the office will operate and deliver its service to the customer allows us to define the normal manner in which information flows and the service is provided, in other words, normal flow. By doing this, we also define when something begins to go wrong with the delivery of the service and abnormalities occur—abnormal flow. This is a critical element of Operational Excellence. No matter how robustly we design the normal flow for a service, things will go wrong. It’s what we do when things go wrong that counts.

The Need for Management Intervention

Typically, when things go wrong in the office and there is an abnormal condition, the flow of information and work slows down or comes to a halt. To correct the problem, management intervenes and attempts to give direction on what can be done to fix the problem. This process is not always quick, and there is no guarantee that the response given is the correct one needed to resume normal flow. Management has to acquire information, determine what the issue is and its causes and effects, and discuss the issue via emails and phone calls with other management personnel who might be occupied with other tasks and not have availability.

Eventually, if the issue does not get resolved or to bring more awareness to the issues, management calls a meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to resolve the issue that is either negatively affecting the customer at present or that will do so if nothing is done. After much debate, negotiation, bargaining, and, often, more meetings, a corrective decision is ultimately made and implemented to fix the abnormal flow and resume the normal flow of work and information to the customer. This takes quite a bit of management time, effort, and coordination to resolve the issue and get the service to the customer. In fact, in many companies, it’s a full-time position.

In achieving Operational Excellence in the office, this is where the contrast lies. Once achieved, there is no need for endless emails, meetings, or status updates. Management intervention is greatly reduced, along with all of the coordination efforts and the hours spent each day “managing” the services we provide in the office. In fact, Operational Excellence can eliminate the need for management intervention almost entirely. Instead, the office runs autonomously, delivering the service day in and day out by self-correcting when abnormalities occur, allowing management to spend its time on activities that grow the business, or offense activities.

How is the need for management intervention virtually eliminated? It’s not done by strong leaders who drive people to improve. It’s done by following a methodology or process. The key is to design how information should flow to the customer using principles and guidelines rather than seeking to eliminate waste through brainstorming or kaizen (rapid improvement) activities. There are places where we will use brainstorming and kaizen activities in Operational Excellence, but we do not use them in the design phase.

Once we have designed the flow of information through the office, and thereby defined normal and abnormal flow, the next step is to make those flow conditions visible. This means that anyone in the office, and even a visitor, would be able to walk the flow from beginning to end and identify whether the service provided is proceeding normally or abnormally. This is known as the “acid test” for Operational Excellence: Bring a visitor into your office and see if he/she can tell if it is on time for the service it provides. After all, if a visitor can tell if the service is on time, then so can the people who work there, including, most importantly, those who work directly in the flow.

With a designed flow implemented, along with visuals in place that tell us if the flow is normal or abnormal, we can teach the employees who work in the flow how to recognize when abnormal conditions have occurred and what can be done to correct them. This creates self-healing value streams (which is a key concept in Operational Excellence) in the office that flow work and information seamlessly and autonomously to the customer, which eliminates the need for management intervention.

In an office that achieves Operational Excellence, managers no longer need to spend time creating status updates, attending meetings, or chasing emails and voicemails. They now spend their time focusing squarely on the activities that grow the business, such as meeting with customers, meeting with potential customers, focusing exclusively on the voice of the customer (VOC), and innovating new products and services with customers. Additionally, the organizational chart has very few positions dedicated to the oversight and delivery of the service to the customer because it just works autonomously day in and day out. The end result of an office that has achieved Operational Excellence is the ability to leverage your office for business growth, which means your office has a strategic advantage in capturing new business and increasing market share faster than competitors, both immediately and well into the future.

Applying Lean Concepts to the Office

In 1996, the book Lean Thinking¹ was published, and it started a movement to improve mostly manufacturing operations throug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• How to Use This Book
• Part One: Getting Started
• Part Two: Applying the Nine Guidelines for Office Flow
• Part Three: Creating Operational Excellence in the Office
• Appendices
• Index