Group items tagged

There are some great ideas in here. I love labeling the light switches, because we went a couple of days last week where the lights in the front office were off since no one knew where the swtch was. Color coding the printer / printer cartridge is brilliant. Instruction sheets for office equipment...

I'm going to use this in my 5S class on Thrusday.

Office Waste

Very cool office improvement

So $imple - time is a big waste in the office environment.

Where could we try this? It sounds like a great technique.

We've been attempting to do this with our daily huddle's in POD & Pressroom. I'm going to put this article in front of the innovation team today and see what we can get going. This technique can be used in any of our production teams and perhaps if we put scheduling & production together for a bit we could build some trust between the two.

Super fast document creation.

Creating a positive workplace is critical to a company's success. Most people who have experience working in an office have seen firsthand the difference between one that has a positive environment and one that doesn't. A positive work environment has a better productivity rate, happier workers overall, better morale, and a lower turnover rate.

A push system, where work is foisted upon a department from the outside, by its very nature will lead to overloading a system and exploding lead times. A pull system, where work is taken from a pile of projects by the people doing the work when they're ready for it, ensures that the department matches inputs and outputs for maximum efficiency. Interestingly, this approach is rare. There's a tendency in the office environment to treat "production" capacity as infinite. Partly this tendency is due to people's willingness to work late into the night or on weekends. Partly this tendency is due to the difficulty of calculating how much time a particular project will take. Inherent in knowledge work is the inability to take a project to completion in a smooth, uninterrupted flow.

Pick a process to start and "pull"

How about JT production. JTs are currently pushed into the Planning Dept from Program Mgt. Let's see how we would install a pull system.

Article about waste in office operations and personal waste as well.

When you're trafficking in information, you're dealing with electrons. It takes tremendous effort to see and measure the waste in an office process, because most of it resides in files stored on your computer and in your inbox.

When I asked the president at Anvex how he trained his managers, he answered, "Every manager must work inside the manufacturing process for a period of time. It is important for them to understand how their decisions within their department will affect the rest of the organization, otherwise it is impossible for them to make assertive decisions. Every single manager knows perfectly well what happens in each process because their desks are in the middle of the operation. This way they know when something happens as it is happening and not hours afterward. We do not have offices, they are not considered necessary. Private issues or problems are handled in conference or training rooms."

This is completely true. You need to know and understand for 100% all the processes in your manufacturing process.

As part of our onboarding process every person needs to spend time in the Mfg areas. I think we could widen this and say they need to spend time in each operation area. When I worked at L&L this was a requirement before you could actually begin the job you were hired for.

Perhaps a little hard to tell, but there's an identical air conditioning unit in every single little office. Hundreds of them (it's a large building). I saw similar examples with large apartment buildings. Is central air a waste? Sure there's some production efficiency in large-scale utilities - wait did I just say that? But how much of that efficiency is wasted when it is delivered to areas that don't necessarily need it. Would smaller units that can be easily turned off create greater aggregate system efficiency? Aggregate "actual in use" efficiency vs. the "large scale production efficiency"? It's the same issue that electric cars and makers of single-home power plants (solar, geo, etc) are wrestling with.

I don't know about this one.

Businesses are full of managerial approval loops. An employee wants to take a break, and he must check in with the supervisor. An employee wants to buy a hand tool, and she must go through channels to put in the request. A back-office employee wants to do something to take care of a customer, and he has to get permission. An employee wants to learn a new skill, and must get authorization from her manager for the company to pay for evening classes. In each of these cases, if you talked to the manager, you would probably hear something along the lines of the approval being a check to ensure that the employee does not make a mistake. These bosses feel like the approval process is good for the company. But I see it as something significantly different. I see a red flag that screams poor process. I see a lack of trust. I see unclear standards. I see an untrained employee. In short, I see a leadership failing.

Unclutterer.com is a fascinating, intensive site dedicated to improving personal productivity and quality of life by the elimination of unnecessary stuff.  The site's dozens of topics range from bedroom and kitchen, to college dorm, office, and general productivity and time management.

How could we replicate this?

Why was the trimming of the email inboxes important? When inboxes are gorged with junk like Las Vegas-era Elvis, the terrible "signal to noise" ratio makes it difficult to identify and respond to what's truly important. Moreover, each email contains information and ideas that are part of the value streams that flow through the staff. When that information gets stuck in someone's inbox - when the value stream stops flowing - you're looking at nothing more than another form of excess inventory. Awesome point!

Could we do a workshop with one department, and implement some of these ideas plus some of the departments ideas? Could this be an initiative for the 5-S team? Could we add some of these suggestions to Time Management? I think that all are possible approaches. Which shall we try first?

An interesting visual way to manage your tasks.

Will I see it on display in your office next week? Tracking "doing" and "backlog" with movable post its is interesting.

I may give it a try, I haven't decided yet.

Interesting idea -- A Kaizen newspaper