Customer Reviews

Value Stream Management for the Lean Office

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is such a welcome addition to my book shelf. I tried so hard last year to try to translate manufacturing value stream mapping to the transactional world and found it very difficult. This book simplifies the approach incredibly. There are some typos in the book as well as one figure that is missing some icons. The bad part about the book is that it does seem to spend a lot of time saying the same thing over and over and over again while skipping over some very important VSM concepts like dealing with multiple flows, etc. You need to have a good background in VSM and lean in order to absorb this book easily. I appreciate the fact though that the authors try to demonstrate the tools on three or four examples throughout the book, but why not put in a few other case studies all the way through???!!! I hate having just one complete case study like in the book Learning to See. Not all situations are the same so having several examples can be very helpful.

This book conveys the essence of how a Lean Office can be achieve. It does a superb job of introducing the concepts and provides practical approaches to solving administrative work flow problems utilizing Lean tools. Highly Recommended, best one out there!

I found this to be a good book on translating the tools of manufacturing to an office environment. It communicates all of the basics that are required.

I've attended one of this consulting group's manufacturing classes. I found them to be dead on. I like the way they handled the accounting/cost/metric relationship to lean production. Basically, the current accounting standards will cause you to do things in opposition to what lean principles will have you do.

In some other office scenarios, I think this more traditional approach will not have all the pieces or tools required. I work in an industry where order entry is significantly more complex than the examples presented, a much higher degree of interaction with other players is required, and rework loops are significant part of the process (customer driven rework). ANITECH has an approach that tracks the information flow surrounding the work process, while applying the same lean techniques that are presented in this book.

Tracking the information flow provides an opportunity to sort out, automate, and lean out that information flow. There is tremendous leverage in this concept.

Value Stream Management for The Lean Office provide me a basic and thorough understanding on how the Toyota Production System can be applied in an office. The authors did a good job in breaking all the Lean tools down into administrative terms. I use this book for all our Lean office projects and would highly recommend anyone attempting to implement Lean in the office to read this.

This book is really hard to be rated. Knowing already about JIT/Lean and especially about QRM-approach, I was looking for a book about value stream mapping and office operations to get started (beginner).

First of all, lets start to take a look what I found helpful about this book. The book provides good information about related issues as pitch, heijunka, selecting product-families for determining common processes (known to people with part grouping experiences etc.) and especially about the required project-management.

On the other side the book is weak about explaining the VSM technique itself. This is mainly related to the example chosen, which I found hard to understand and not very helpful. E.g. the key about data to be collected - to describe every process-step itself as L/T, processing time and many more - is only weak described. Without this, you might be able to draw your VSM, but the later good overview/ visualization and optimization opportunity is lost. This can be done much better!

Books as e.g. Complete Lean Enterprise do a much better job here and the example of a company used is much better to explain VSM for people working in industrial environment. Reading this book is easy and understandable - straight forward!

As a beginner in this area, I therefore stick to the book Complete Lean Enterprise and for some special issues, I sometimes use this book rated here. This book here looks a little bit like a summary of lots of important different points about VSM, but I'm personally in favore of books based on simple and realistic examples where text and figures can be simply followed. Without the additional and helpful information provided in this book, I would have given it a rating of 2 stars or even less..

Best Regards,
Oliver

"Value Stream Management for the Lean Office" provides a clear and uncomplicated approach to implementing lean in an administrative environment. At $45 for 150 pages of text it is pricey, but is it worth it ? That, I think, depends on your need. On the plus side the book is very clearly written and lays out a step by step route to lean in the office. Mapping forms and charts to use are presented on the accompanying CD-ROM. It is a straightforward approach which might well suit a fairly small office environment with processes that are not too complicated. However, "simple" can easily become "simplistic" and the book does not adequately cover the issues pertaining in a large or complex environment, with lots of interaction between departments, people or activities. In addition the book provides very little background to lean and no discussion of the philosophy on which lean rests. Thus the book lists stages and actions without giving the reader an understanding of the reasoning or concepts behind lean.

If you have a straightforward office environment, perhaps in a small business, then this book should help you. If your needs are more complex, then you should probably look elsewhere.

This is the kind of guide you need to get started together with professional help from outside your organization. As they say, there are no Lean experts, only more experienced people - it shows that Tom Shuker belongs to this category.

I found this book to be a staple for our Lean Office training. It breaks down the Lean concepts into administrative terms and does not get too technical. It's a great beginning to the Lean Office journey!