Lean Beyond the Factory Floor

Lean is a way of improving work by giving customers what they value with less waste, less waiting and less effort. Its ideas grew from the Toyota Production System in Japan in the decades after 1945. Later, writers in the West gave the approach the name "Lean".

Most people still picture Lean in a car factory: parts moving on a line, boxes on shelves, workers at stations. But the same ideas apply wherever work flows from one person to another to serve a customer. An invoice moves through a finance team. A claim moves through a customer-service team. A purchase order moves through procurement. A new employee moves through human resources (HR) onboarding. Each of these is a process, and each can be slow, full of mistakes and frustrating for the people inside it.

Office work is still work that flows

In an office, the "product" is often information: a decision, an approval, a record, an answer. You cannot see it on a shelf, but it still moves, waits and sometimes goes wrong. Lean asks the same questions it asks in a factory:

• Who is the customer, and what do they actually want?
• Which steps create that value, and which do not?
• Where does the work wait, and why?
• Where is work done twice because it was not right the first time?

Example: a customer refund at Quorvale Logistics

Quorvale Logistics, a delivery company, takes about three weeks to refund a customer for a damaged parcel. When the team follows one refund, they find that the actual work takes about forty minutes. The rest of the time the case waits: for a photo from the driver, for a supervisor’s approval, for the weekly payment run. Nobody is lazy. The process is designed to wait. This is the typical starting point for Lean in a service team.