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What is Lean Office? How can it help your Business
What is Lean Office?
Lean Office is about finding ways to streamline and standardize office and other processes to save a company time, money, and sometimes professional reputation. It is exactly like lean management, or time study management in manufacturing. For business, Lean Office means thinking differently about job tasks, about people’s behavior, and about your company’s culture.
A company can streamline the processes they have chosen by taking a little time to breakdown the processes of each job step by step to see if something in the process itself can be changed or removed to smooth out the work flow, or even cut down on time spent doing specific tasks.
Manufacturing has done process time studies for years. It has helped streamline their work flow and cut costs without hurting anything. Offices and businesses haven’t really looked closely at more than putting together steps or the process it takes to do a job.
Most don’t think about the time it takes to do a job that contains a number of steps that don’t actually include what is often defined as productive work, so it isn’t counted in the time it supposedly takes to do a job task. That non-productive work adds up to a lot of time that through thought and Lean Office practices can be eliminated.
