Customer Reviews

The Lean Office: Collected Practices and Cases (Insights on Implementation)

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I have been involved with Lean for 10+ years and have served as an internal consultant and internal change agent for the last several years. I am always looking for material that helps me to learn about new ideas or helps others pick up the tools and concepts, but was very disappointed in this book. It is a collection of "best practices", but only touches on a few concepts from a very high level, with the "we had a problem, we waved a magic wand, and it was fixed" format. There is nothing in this book that helps you figure out how to apply the concepts to what you are working on or that gives you new ideas to try. You're much better off figuring out how to apply VSM in the office, having everyone look at the process, and then develop a future state together than trying to get anything from this book.

Most lean office books are lean manufacturing books with the word "office" pasted in. This booklet has some of the same issues - it addresses lean manufacturing principles and calls them lean office. The structure of the book is good with titles such as "Takeaways", where the takeaways are sometimes limited: "A focus on meeting cusomer needs is critical".

Overall, this book is valuable to gather ideas about what some companies have done - it is case study based and is not in-depth or even BEST practices.

A more detailed look at lean office can be seen in Michael George's Lean Six Sigma for Service.

A total of eighteen chapters -- five in Part 1: Focusing on the Customer, four in Part II: Improving Flow, and nine in Part III: Taking the Right Steps.

In Parts I and II, the case studies cover the following types of office environments:

* automobile distribution * service firm * the design process * call center * restaurant operation * ambulance office * US Postal Service * design of buildings * construction projects.

In Part III, tips and ideas cover: office 5S, computer hard drive 5S, building support for Lean Office, tips for running 'white collar' kaizens, an invoicing and receiving improvement example in detail, improving flow at a technical publications company, an example of using a spreadsheet to analyze and manage a lean effort, and a publisher who requires present state and future state maps to accompany all capital expenditure requests.

Although this book is not a 'nuts and bolts' technical treatise, all in all, it is encouraging to read about the efforts and successes. Perhaps it would rate five-stars if it contained more technical instructions with the case studies. But then, you'd probably pay a lot more for it.