Office, Lean

Last updated by Jeff Hajek on April 27, 2021

The Lean office is the result of the progression of Lean from the shop floor to the office environment.

It was logical and inevitable that continuous improvement would move from the assembly line to create the Lean office. Why? A significant portion of a manufacturing company costs are administrative. And, of course, service organizations also needed an effective way to improve their operations as well.

The Lean office is to administrative process what Lean manufacturing is to production work. It improves flow and reduces waste.

This helps the top line by adding customer value (shorter lead times, for example) and helps the bottom line by taking out waste.

The Lean office has several distinctions from the shop floor:

Demand doesn’t keep well in the Lean office. Think about phone calls. People hang up if they don’t get helped; product orders don’t jump out of line as often.
The Lean office focuses on people. Sure, everyone uses a computer, but the information tends to come from people-related processes, whether customer or coworker. People don’t have the same consistency that machines do.
People have multiple jobs in the Lean office. Shop floor employees might move to different stations, but they don’t have several queues of work flowing in the way an office employee might. Consider an accounting specialist who has to help prepared quarterly reports, process expense accounts, and do credit checks. Multiple jobs make managing the flow of work in the Lean office difficult.
Inputs are more variable in the Lean office. One order might have a single line item on it, and the next might have a hundred. You seldom get the same variation on an assembly process.
Lean office work is hard to see. On the shop floor, you can watch a widget move down the line. In the Lean office, you can’t see a loan application in the same way, especially when it is done electronically.