Lean Means Managing Change
CASE STUDY: THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION
Plop, Plop, Plop
I was standing in front of a pile of financial documents, about 30 years accumulation by a retired employee. It had been moved to the Executive area and the CFO wanted to go through it. The pile sat in front of the COO’s office and close to 5 pm, I looked at a few of the documents. Hmmm. We have multiple copies of this one, and I dropped it into a pile on the floor—Plop. I looked at a few more—Plop. At the end of a half hour, there were very few documents left that had the possibility of any use.
Before this, a senior leader had turned me down when I asked for leadership in a document management improvement event. The project inched slowly ahead until my review of the stored documents. When we mapped the current state, we saw the document nightmare and how it affected everyone in the organization.
A future state of total digital document management was created. We implemented a P Card System that digitized procurement, followed by a new Financial Management Accounting System with digital record use and storage. A Human Resource Information System with digital processes and
finished the system out with document management software supporting digital signatures. The benefits were immediate. On March 1, 2020, our system went live. On March 14, 2020, our office went to remote work because of the Covid Pandemic. Workflow continued uninterrupted. Without the process improvements, we would have been unable to work remotely.
CASE STUDY: ORGANIZING THE WORKPLACE
Some reports in the early 2000’s required a typewriter. And although we knew we had a couple of them in the office somewhere, we couldn’t find them. So we had to buy another one.
That’s when we were able to convince staff to do a 5 “S” event, also referred to as Workplace Organization.
It’s called 5 “S” after its steps:
Sort, Shine, Set in Order, Standardize and Sustain.
During the Sort phase, everything in the workplace is removed and only items used in the past 6 months are allowed back in. Unused items go to a Red Tag area where they can be redeployed to other parts of the organization or sold to staff.
Shine means the workplace gets cleaned and upgraded.
Set in order takes the items going back into the workspace and assigns it a space. In some cases, the space is marked out by tape and given an address. The item has the address put on it so it can be returned to where it belongs.
Standardize is settling on one type of item, for example, pens. Sustain means to keep the area organized at the end of every day and every week.
Knowing where to go for a tool or implement saves time. When combined with total productive maintenance, every item is ready to go when needed. Solutions are easy. Committing to implement solutions is more difficult.
If you are ready to start doing and stop just thinking about doing, productively can improve dramatically. If you are ready to start doing, give me a call for a free consultation.