What is Operational Excellence in the Office?

Kevin Duggan, with Tim Healey, recently published an important new book that expands on, and transcends, the topic of value stream mapping titled Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques. I asked Kevin to specifically tell me: “What separates this book from all the others on value stream mapping?” Here is his complete answer:

Operational Excellence in Your Office is much different than previous value stream mapping books. The subject matter of this book is achieving true Operational Excellence in the office, and not ways to merely eliminate waste in the office. True Operational Excellence is defined as “when each and every employee can see the flow of value to the customer, and fix that flow when it breaks down.” This means we establish “self-healing value streams” that run autonomously day in and day out without management intervention.

The book provides a detailed overview of exactly what Operational Excellence is and how it applies in the office. The book does not teach how to create value stream maps, but it uses value stream maps to show how to design self-healing flow in the office. 

The word design here is key. In many value stream mapping techniques, we have been taught to make a current state map, look for waste, and think of an ideal state, or use brainstorming tools to try and develop a future state. However, in Operational Excellence, it’s different. In Operational Excellence, we create a current state; however, we then put it on the wall and just leave it there. The next step is to learn the nine guidelines of office flow. These guideline teach us how to handle high variation in customer demand (as the concept of traditional takt time just won’t work in the office), how to sequence work, where we can possibly do a one-piece processing cell, how to move work through the office using workflow cycles, how to move large amounts of information from one area of the company to another, where we can initialize work and at what points can we re-sequence work, how to tell if the office flows are on time, and what to do when the customer changes their demand or new demand comes in that exceeds what the value stream was designed to do. 

The key to these guidelines is that they provide a method to design what we will then consider to be normal flow. And by establishing normal flow, we have then established what abnormal flow is. 

Understanding and reacting to abnormal flow is a state that very few companies achieve. However, this is exactly the goal of Operational Excellence: seeing, understanding, and correcting abnormal flow without the need for any management intervention. Without the need for management to direct and control information flow in the office with status meetings, update meetings, or meetings to fix abnormal conditions, management can now spend their time on activities that grow the business, or offense activities. 

What separates this book from other value stream mapping books is that we are not teaching value stream mapping in this book; we are teaching how to design value streams that achieve Operational Excellence in your office. Value streams designed using the guidelines in the book can then become self-healing, and deliver the service day in and day out autonomously, without the need for management intervention, freeing up time for management to spend on growing the business. 

Are there any readers familiar with "self-healing value streams"? If so, what have been your experiences?

Three Free Videos on Integrating Lean and Green

I recently viewed this three-part video series by Carlos Venegas (author of the book Flow in the Office) on the Straus Forest website. Carlos concisely discusses and illustrates the integration of Lean and Green. In addition, he includes this 12-point tip sheet directed specifically to environmental, health and safety (EH&S) professionals.

One of the most important points is discussed by Jennifer Tice (from Ross & Associates) in the third video titled "How Lean and Green Can Go Viral" -- although particular pilot projects might be limited in scope in regard to improvements, the awareness and empowerment gained by front-line employees might have a "ripple effect." That is, these employees begin to scrutinize their other daily processes with a "Lean eye" and begin to see waste as well as improvement opportunities that they did not think about previously.

What is your opinion of these videos?

Making the Invisible Visible

In a recent blog post titled Green Money, I requested that readers provide their "thoughts on the tactics used and difficulties faced when mapping electronic value streams." I received an insightful response from Carlos Venegas (author of the book Flow in the Office) explaining how he approaches that subject, so I am presenting it here:

“The key task in improving any electronic or office process is making the invisible visible. In factory environments, you can see what’s happening. We don’t always have that luxury in the office. Too much happens inside computers, inside people’s heads, and between people in conversations and meetings. Luckily, there are ways to make the invisible visible.

Let’s start with value stream mapping (VSM). This tool is excellent for making the invisible visible. Because you are capturing blocks of activity on the value stream map, you are making the invisible visible. It’s really a no-brainer. You must not do anything different if you think of automated processes as blocks of work, just like in a factory process. From the VSM, you can determine which systems are parts of kaizen opportunities.

It’s in these kaizen opportunities that people tend to run into problems. How do you address an office process or computerized process using lean tools and principles? Again, the key challenge is making the invisible visible.

Here’s one way to do it: build a workflow chart. Within the scope/boundaries of the targeted process, print out screen captures of every single screen used in a process. Then put the screen captures up sequentially. Now, draw lines from data element to data element. (Sometimes there are paper forms used in the process; include those, too.) The workflow chart helps the team see the four wastes of the office: information waste, process waste, physical waste, and people inefficiencies.

In factory workshops, teams will often do a process walk to level-set the team concerning the process and the wastes held within. The workflow chart gives the office team the opportunity to have a ‘virtual’ process walk. They can use the workflow chart to understand the process, identify the specific wastes, and design experiments, and then document the solutions.”