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The 4 Deadly Office Wastes

How to identify and eliminate them

Ever since Lean was invented by Toyota over 50 years ago, the key theme has been to eliminate waste in our organisations.

For those of you not familiar with Ohno's seven wastes or 'seven sins of Muda' they are: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting time, Over-production, Over-processing, Defects.

Organisations have become quite familiar with identifying these wastes in production environments. Examples could be forklift trucks travelling without a load or too far, piles of unfinished parts, a process waiting for machines to be changed over or because equipment is broken and so on.

But what about waste in our offices - accounts, administration, sales, planning etc? Can you even recognise waste in offices, let alone eliminate it?

In the following article we will examine how to identify the four deadly office wastes and offer some suggestions for eliminating them.

First let us define waste.

Fig 1. Value Added and Waste.

The above fig 1. defines value added as what the customer values. Everything else is waste. After all if the customer doesn't value it why are we doing it?

However, there are some jobs that we must do because of legal requirements, limitations of technology or it is necessary under the current operating conditions. This we call enabling or necessary waste. Things that the customer doesn't value or that is not absolutely necessary we call pure waste. We should always strive in our businesses to maximise customer value, minimise necessary waste and eliminate the rest.

So what about work in our offices? How do we identify value and waste

Bearing in mind value is specified by our customer, the following may be contenders for office value:

Fig 2. Examples of Value Added in Offices

Only the parts of the task that add value to the customer and are carried out efficiently, consistently and accurately can be counted as value added. Waste is everything else.

There are four deadly office wastes are:

1. Information waste
2. Process waste
3. Physical waste
4. People waste

Examples of information waste are

• Repeated input /output - data fields requested twice
• Incompatible systems - unable to share data
• Manual checking of data - incorrect data base info
• Unused information - outdated reports
• Re-entered information - lost or incorrect info
• Converting formats - incompatible files types, lack of templates
• Missing information - non-standard inputs
• Incorrect/unclear data - no data labels
• Data safety - loss or corruption of data

Examples of process waste are:

• Transport - handoffs, taking things to others
• Inventory - a task waiting to be started
• Motion - walking, rerouting information
• Waiting - delays, queues
• Over production - unnecessary or unused information
• Over processing - unnecessary steps, variations
• Defects - incomplete information, retyping

Examples of physical waste are:

• Health & safety - poor ventilation, insufficient lighting, noise, fire hazards, poor access (too high/low), faulty equipment, overfilled drawers (tipping), trips hazards, poor ergonomics
• Layout/organisation - distances between departments, shared resources/equipment, travelling, poor process flow

and examples of People waste are:

• Unclear role - no/unclear job descriptions
• Lack of training - causes other types of waste
• Work interruptions - telephone, walk-ins, emails
• Multi-tasking - unclear priorities, too much work
• Underutilised talents - cross-functional skills, responsibilities
• Hierarchy & structure - too many levels, authority
• Lack of strategic focus - departmental thinking
• Recruitment errors - selecting wrong person, overlooking the right person

That's a lot of wastes and these are only a small selection of examples!

When tackling office waste the excellent model presented by Womack and Jones in their book 'Lean Thinking' is recommended. This is:

1. Precisely specify customer value by specific product/service;
2. Identify the value stream for each product/service;
3. Make value flow without interruptions;
4. Let the customer pull value from the producer;
5. Pursue perfection.

Identify what the office function really does in relation to the end customer. Sometimes this may seem a little remote from customer facing work, however, careful inspection will reveal how the function relates to customer value, often by examining the value stream. For example paying suppliers may seem remote from end user customers; however this function is part of the goods and services supply value stream, which is directly linked to customer satisfaction as part of the product or main service value stream.

Even administrative support functions, such as secretarial services can be linked to customer value in this way.

Be careful not to fall in to the trap of only thinking about what the office function traditionally did. Systems and procedures build up in a company and often provide no added value. Be prepared to think radically about what is done and how it is done. For example, why do office staff sit to do their work and many front line operators stand? Why do you sit down round a table for a meeting? Stand-up meetings at the place where the work gets done are usually shorter and more effective. Why do you need to get a signatory to sign off a piece of work? Can the work be done in such a way as to not have any errors or why can't the person doing the work pass it off themselves? Challenge everything that is done!

Once the true value of the office function has been identified within a value stream, organise the office so that the work flows from step to step without delay. Reorganise along the value stream and break down departmental thinking in to value stream thinking.

Get the work to be pulled from the downstream processes by the upstream processes in a streamlined chain. Avoid batch production as far as absolutely possible and strive for perfection by reorganising again and again to remove more and more waste as it is uncovered by the above process.

Lean concepts that were originally developed for production environments can be used with dramatic effect in office based functions with a little adaptation. This article has shown how waste can be identified and eliminated by keeping customer value in sight and linking the function to the company's value streams.

If you want to know more about Lean in office and administrative functions contact SigmaPro to find out about our comprehensive training and support programmes.

Author Bigraphy

David Cowburn - Master Black Belt Lean Six Sigma