lean office

Improve Back Office Efficiency By Finding the “Checkers”

10 August 2010 0 comments

Yes, most organizations would be well served by identifying all the people checking other peoples work as all or part of their job.  Big organizations are just full of checking and any process where work products wind through various teams is sure to have lots of it.  It is easy to miss though because traditional [...]

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Management Approach – Beyond Management by Walking Around

4 August 2010 0 comments

Most executives pride themselves on being connected to their business, no matter how large. They perform site visits to far flung operations with lots of small talk, hand shaking, and conference room meetings. It often looks like the practices decribed in this article and this one which is better.   In my experience, these activities can [...]

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Visual Workplace in a Pre-K Classroom

9 April 2010 0 comments

Dropping my 5 year old off at school today, I remarked at how many visual workplace elements were implemented in her pre-K classroom.  Yes you read that correctly.  These teachers have implemented a bunch of concepts without even explicitly knowing it.  Here are a few examples of visual workplace in the classroom. The floor in [...]

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Lean Office Practices for Repetitive Work

16 March 2010 0 comments

Lean office practices for repetitive work should be the easiest to implement and actually view. For some reason they are rarely implemented in an effective way in office environments. Please reference my previous post on work types to get some context on our first focus area here. Just to summarize, repetitive work in an office [...]

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Lean in Support Organizations

3 February 2010 0 comments

In addition to my focus on implementing Lean with systems, I will add commentary on implementing Lean in support organizations.  I have spent much of my career doing this, often as part of bigger improvement efforts.  I am seeing more companies begin to focus on productivity in support and the back office.  The Lean concepts [...]

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