Customer Reviews

The Complete Lean Enterprise: Value Stream Mapping for Administrative and Office Processes

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For a long time "lean thinking" has been focused on the shop floor. Almost all the books and training materials deal exclusively with production issues. At last, we have a practical book on how to apply lean to office processes. In this book Locher & Keyte show how to extend value stream mapping out of the shop floor and into the all-important support processes like order-entry, customer service, product configuration & design, purchasing, accounts payable, and others. The step-by-step approach makes it easy to adapt these examples to your own real-life situation. This book will become the standard approach to office process improvements and kaizens.

This book is a good tutorial to apply Lean to an office setting, but a basic understanding of the Lean principles is required to take full advantage of the work as many parallels are drawn between manufacturing applications and their office counterparts. Overall very useful, but especially in a manufacturing/production-support office environment more than in a traditional service or other type of office setting.

The value of this book depends strongly on your personal knowledge about VSM and JIT/Lean. I was more used to the approach from Quick-Response-Manufacturing as Tagging&Process Mapping. Anyway, for people searching an introduction to Value-Stream-Mapping and especially the office part, I can recommend this book - the production part of the good example used, is not discussed in details - but this is not the goal of the book anyway. I read many different books to get started with VSM, but this one is one of the simpliest and most consistent books about VSM for office operation. The writters refer to one single example of a company and develop the case in a understandable manner.

Readers interested in VSM for the shoopfloor should read this book as well. As a matter, it is unfortunatelly true, that companies focus there attention to the shopfloor operations, meanwhile the potential of upstream and non-production processes are ignored. This book gives you a good knowledge, how to start your journey.

I bought both books, Complete-Lean-Enterprise (the one I refer to here) as well as Value-Stream-Management-for-the-Lean-Office. Meanwhile the first one gave me a much better overview how to practice VSM, the second one was quite week (bad case example in my oppinion) and I could not get the point how to proceed with the VSM-technique. On the other side, the later book provides more information about important issues as pitch, heijunka, work balancing etc., but already using VSM for the shopfloor and having knowledge about JIT/Lean, this will not provide new insights to you anyway. Conclusion, I would recommend this book here to get started and definetly not the book Value-Stream-Mgmnt.-for-the-Lean-office!

Best Regards,
Oliver

Excellent 'how to ' book for a VSM beginner. The 'hands-on' approach presented in the book is easy to follow and the illustrations are first rate.

This book is a good tool to use if you are trying to understand the Lean Process.
But more details are required if you want to implement in your Administration department
would recommend this book to any office Manager.

This is an excellent resource for office staff wanting to value stream map their work. Its written in a clear no nonsense style with ideas you can put into practice immediately.

I like the insider 'Lean Note' every so often providing hits and ideas you would only get from an experienced lean leader, these tips are designed to stop you going down a blind ally.

If you are thinking of running a Kaizen event in your administrative area you would benefit from everyone on your team having this resource to hand.

The approach is particularly useful for manufacturing companies who have already gone lean on the production floor and are waiting for their office support and administration functions to catch up.

Highly recommended..

This bok is very helpful in builing your first process maps and is also useful when leading a kaizen event.

Best reference and how to on adminstrative functions for value sream mapping.