Improve methods and reduce risk with Lean Office strategies

Moss Adams and eta consulting hosted a webinar in the early summer of 2024 on the application of Toyota’s operating disciplines to office and back-office processes — what the Lean canon calls Lean Office, the application of the same waste-reduction and visual-management techniques to information work that the original Toyota Production System applied to assembly. Six questions came in via the webinar chat that the time on the call could not accommodate. What follows is the answers, lightly edited from the working notes I sent the questioners afterwards.

Can a Lean Office be implemented one department at a time, or does it need to be a company-wide shift to be most effective?

The practice usually starts with a single process radically improved in a one-week kaizen event. The improvements come from the ideas of the people actually working in the process, who may be drawn from several departments. Starting with a bottleneck process or a single bottleneck department — rather than with the whole organisation — keeps the effort visibly meaningful and produces results quickly. Both contribute to buy-in.

Can you help with construction?

The practice has worked in precast concrete manufacturing, electrical contracting, and chemical floorings. Lean methods are unusually applicable to construction because they are organised around ensuring customers get precisely what they want, where they want it, when they want it — which is the operational heart of a well-run construction project, and the operational heart of most construction projects that go wrong.

The process improvements have possibilities, but what happens when you run into a department that is “too busy” to make changes?

Lean is most required by the organisations that have too much work; the busyness is the symptom rather than the contraindication. Leadership support is essential to getting the first dominoes in any Lean journey to fall, and the practice secures buy-in through charter sessions that take one to four hours of a team’s time to define the problem and demonstrate what kind of result a one-week kaizen can produce. Most operators are convinced when they are presented with a concrete plan of action they can see themselves executing.

Could you give an example in the accounting domain?

Several. The practice has worked on:

– Enhancing cashflow by increasing inventory turns – Improving the customer experience by shortening the time required to qualify customers into the accounts-receivable process – Reducing costs by reducing the cycle time of the purchase-requisition-to-purchase-order conversion – Eliminating errors by making the procure-to-pay process more efficient – Shortening the month-end close

Is it possible to implement Lean processes without becoming a full Lean culture, with Lean officers and so on?

Yes. Treat Lean activities as a spectrum: at one end are kaizen events, which lead with process development; at the other is the full Lean Office, which leads with people development. The former can involve as little as a single operator improving their own workstation. Examples of single-person workstation improvements abound on YouTube; they are a defensible starting point for a firm not yet ready for the larger commitment.

What are some specific examples of Lean in practice — examples of an actual improvement?

Across the practice’s engagements:

– Cycle time reduced from twenty hours to five hours – Warehouse kitting time reduced from two hours to ten minutes – Manufacturing capacity increased and batch sizes reduced by reducing change-over time from forty-four minutes to four minutes – Overtime eliminated by creating flow in an assembly line – Throughput doubled without additional manpower or capital expenditure

The financial impact of these kinds of changes is substantial and is documented in the practice’s case-study graphs. Most of the gains come not from new equipment or new software but from rearranging existing capacity to be used more deliberately — creativity before capital, as the practice’s tagline has it.

If you would like to discuss how Lean could be applied to your own operation, contact Steve Fineberg at Moss Adams (stephen.fineberg@mossadams.com, 530.400.1870) or Rishi Malhotra at eta consulting (rishi@increaseeta.com, 775.287.6168).

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