Paul Akers recommends teaching people above all to see waste. This sounds quite simple, after all, enough has already been written about the various types of waste. However, almost exclusively for production and all those who have attempted a transfer to office work have not come up with more or less suitable analogies to the categories of production.
However, there are other facets in the office and the hot spots are also different, which is essentially due to the fact that work in offices is thought work and remains invisible except for the results available at the end. I have already described many of the existing varieties in the book “Fifty Ways to Waste” To make it easier to access and make waste more visible, they are condensed into a handful of types below. The basic structure follows the familiar waste types, but specialties are added and all types all ranked in descending order of importance.
- People are the experts:
If it is not the processes that are the experts, but the people (quote from Paul Akers), then this is because those involved repeatedly take on similar tasks in their fixed areas of responsibility. As responsible experts, they do not have to think long and hard or document agreements made and are therefore much faster. Supposedly. However, the fixed assignment of work content promotes waiting times and the constant repetition prevents both personal and operational growth. If such experts are absent, the tasks have to wait or there is stress when looking for a replacement. The largely individual procedures make it difficult for new employees to familiarize themselves with the specifics of these activities.
- Inventories
There is inventories in the office in the form of piles of unfinished tasks. They result primarily from fluctuating workloads in combination with fixed responsibilities and largely fixed working hours. This leads to tasks remaining unfinished during periods of high workload, which extends their processing time and has all kinds of negative consequences: Over time, details and agreements can be forgotten, waiting times for colleagues and customers arise, rescheduling and prioritization become necessary and interruptions can occur due to queries as well as stress, hecticness or switching back and forth between tasks.
- Exceptions
If exceptions are made in production, this is immediately noticeable. The design has to be changed and new materials have to be purchased. Everyone sees this and sometimes it even has to be approved. In office work, on the other hand, it is quite normal that orders are only won by accepting special agreements of all kinds. All first-time requirements involve additional effort for the relevant research, development and decisions. The variance increases and with it the transparency decreases and economies of scale are lost.
- Defects
Defects and rework are more frequent and at the same time more difficult to detect than in production. The most common forms are missing targets or information, misunderstandings during handover and actually incorrect work results, which are usually the result of a hectic pace or a lack of care during processing. Defects cause useless activities, queries and, in the worst case, repetition of the task.
- Changes
In any Internet business, it is almost impossible to change certain key elements at a later date. Ordered is ordered. The situation is different with software, expert opinions, concepts or other results of office work. From objectives to product features and even delivery addresses, everything remains open to discussion even during the course of the task. Even if the changes are only minor, it can be very time-consuming to think about everyone involved and ensure that no ambiguities, misunderstandings or errors result from the change. If even the objectives change along the way, the work sometimes has to start all over again.
- Overprocessing
This category is incredibly diverse, but is of secondary importance compared to the topics mentioned above. All sorts of things can extend the processing time. It can be unnecessary steps, an overly complicated procedure, not using tools or automated processing with software, planning instead of self-organization, excessive precision, willful repetition or the use of a procedure that is only of limited use (e.g. it is not sufficient to send information and expect that therewith the others are already informed).
- Waiting
Of course there can be waiting times. For the computer to start, the regular Microsoft update, approval from the boss or any previous work from a colleague. Usually, however, the large number of waiting tasks ensures that the waiting times can be filled with other work, so that the waste is limited to the respective interruptions.
- Motion and transportation
These are just as present as in physical work, for example as the route taken to the printer. However, the movement of data is now predominantly left to data lines, which is why these types of waste play a lower and lower role in practice.
- Overproduction
Anticipating production due to lot sizes is rather unrealistic when it comes to office work. Rather, dealing with topics without any reference to customer value could be seen as overproduction. Or the overly cautious termination of topics because they are not needed after all or there are too many other topics in progress. Both phenomena would immediately catch the eye in production as completely unusual products or as unfinished goods, which is why they are far less common there than in office work.
Although the majority of work in developed industrialized countries is performed in the service sector or in offices, the elaborations on lean management continue to deal primarily with visible industrial work, preferably in linked systems. Those who deal with office work must at best look for their own solutions. At worst, they concentrate on the usual approach of consultants, using swim-lane diagrams to find unnecessary process steps. Although this is very easy to understand from an engineering point of view, it only helps to reduce a very small part of the existing waste.
A diagram on waste in offices can be downloaded here.
Go to German version.
Picture: unsplash.com / Kaffeebart
