This week, I’m talking to lean expert Tim Schipper about his book Innovative Lean Development and The Highly Effective Office and how you can incorporate lean into your office.
In this episode we talk about how to use lean techniques in the office and admin side of business to eliminate excess waste so your business and team can be at their optimal performance.
What You’ll Learn This Episode:
- Using lean in your office and the administrative side of business
- Eliminating motion waste and excess processing
- Lean focus for optimizing flow in the office
- Value stream maps in the office
- How to engage team members from the beginning
- The value of exposing waste
- Visuals for daily management
About the Guest:
Tim Schipper is the author of Innovative Lean Development and The Highly Effective Office. He also served on the Board of Directors for the Lean Product and Process Development Exchange, an organization promoting the exchange of information between companies in the areas of lean product and lean process development. Tim is an agile and lean expert, teacher and coach.
Important Links:
https://www.amazon.com/Timothy-Schipper/e/B0026GSQTI?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1621458548&sr=1-1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timschipper/
Full Episode Transcript:
Patrick Adams
Welcome to the lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams and I have a special guest with us today. His name is Tim Schipper. And Tim is the author of innovative lean development and the highly effective office. Tim has also served on the board for the lean product and process development exchange, which is an organization promoting the exchange of information between companies in the areas of lean product and lean process development. He’s also an agile and lean expert, teacher and coach. Welcome to the show, Tim.
Tim Schipper
Thank you, Patrick. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. Now, I’m excited to dive in today we’re going to be talking about lean in the office. And Tim works at a local company here in West Michigan. And he and I have met a few times. And I know some of the work that you do, Tim, is obviously on the administrative side or the office side of things, sometimes people tend to tie lean to, you know, manufacturing or making widgets, right. So it makes sense that that would be what we would discuss, but in reality, lean can be applied in industry, in any industry at any team, and most definitely in the office. And so I’m excited to kind of dive in and chat with you a little bit about how lean can be implemented in the office. So what would you say when you think about lean in the office? How does it compare to manufacturing?
Tim Schipper<
So manufacturing, lean is a little more straightforward than it is in the office. Obviously, that’s where lean was applied. First, it came out of Toyota. And they applied all the Lean principles and actually learned it, interestingly enough from some of the people that went over there, like Deming and others. But, you know, on the concrete floor, I always say it’s a lot different than on the carpeted floor of the office. When you’re out on the concrete floor, one of the big differences is you can go to the floor, and you can see the product being made. You can see whether or not it’s flowing. And you can easily spot the waste, you can see the inventory piling up or you can see people transporting parts around the floor. So it’s very different from the office where the process is for the most part hidden. It’s not visible.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. Yeah. And it can be much more difficult to identify waste in the office. Well, but it is there, right? It’s just a different waste, right? Absolutely.
Tim Schipper
If you work in an office, you know that one of the key ways is waiting. Sure. Sure. Like manufacturing. So we wait for responses, we wait for answers. And you know, a lot of people rely on email to get things done in the office, right? I call email, just a giant push system. Right? There’s nothing pulled about it. Because if I’m sending an email to somebody, I don’t know when they’re going to read it. I don’t know when they’re going to respond to it. And I’m just waiting for that response to come back. So you know, the communication techniques in the office can be just ripe with waste.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. And there’s so many other examples too. And I’m sure we’ll talk about a few of these, but I always think about, you know, when you look at excess processing, I think about approvals, right? It’s the It’s like my pet peeve when you see, you know, three or four different levels of approvals. And you have to ask yourself, Is this necessary, you know, or is it a waste? You know, it’s it’s it I’m sure it depends on the situation, right, but how many different levels of approvals are needed and then you know, how much waiting is happening because there’s email approvals that are, you know, sent out to different people. And then oh, someone’s on vacation. So they’re not checking their email. And now we have to wait even longer for them to come back. So that’s one of the ways in the office that I always think, man, if we could only reduce the number of approvals.
Tim Schipper<
Yeah. So the, the favorite question I ask people, when I see a lot of approvals in a process is how many times have they actually declined your request? Many times have they not approved it? And usually you get an answer, like, well, 99% of the time it’s approved, right? And it’s like, why do you go through the approval process? Or is there another thing you can put into place to empower the people at the next level down to make the choice on them? You know, for themselves? Can you put some type of budget limit on it or whatever? Sure. And the other thing I always say to people is, if if you’re relying on an approval processes, try to make it more of a pull system, so that they know what’s coming, that when they get it, they know they have to respond, you can timebox it and put it into a certain window. So you’re not waiting forever for those approvals.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. The other thing that I tend to see, too, is a lot of motion waste in the office. And, you know, people tend to say, you know, well, it’s only it’s only a little bit of time, you know, for me to go find a calculator or for me to walk over to the printer, and back, you know, but then when you if you start to do some time studies, and you really look at the the amount of time that it takes, you know, sure it’s just a little bit of time for that one incident. But what if you multiply that across three or four people, you know, five days a week, and then 52 weeks out of the year that that small amount of time is going to add up very quickly. And it actually becomes a large amount of time that we’re just paying people to walk back and forth. Do you see? Exactly.
Tim Schipper
let’s see a lot of that motion anytime you need to move from one place to another, to the copier, or to go and talk to somebody or to a meeting. Anytime you’re walking anywhere, that’s motion. I personally love standup desks, because it eliminates that time from standing up or sitting down and getting to go, I actually have a stand up desk here at home too. Or I stay for most of the day. And I think it’s a waste just to be sitting and then you know, having to get up and go someplace that it kind of sometimes prevents you from even wanting to get up, right? It’s like, oh, get up.
Patrick Adams
First, I hear you there any
Tim Schipper
more time. It’s like there’s no delay between going and doing it. Right.
Patrick Adams
The older I get, the more that my knees start to you know, I’ll just sit here for another hour.
Tim Schipper
Right? Exactly. Yeah, you know, it’s motions, one of those examples where it applies to all the ways to manufacturing, we have to translate them to the office, people don’t think of them as easily as you think about the ones in the office. So you know, motion in the plants, or in the manufacturing setting on the concrete floors, we know what that looks like, that’s people moving around picking up a tool or going to get parts or going to get paperwork, whatever that is. But, when you say motion to the people in the office or transportation, you know, what does that mean? You know, transportation is, I always say, anything was wings and wheels in manufacturing, right, if I gotta move it by wheels are by wings as transportation. Right? So you know, you have to even kind of spell it out in the office like, well, it’s going to meetings, that’s motion if you have to travel to a meeting, right? That’s right, that’s wasted motion and time.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. And while it can be more difficult to identify the waste is definitely there. So I appreciate the examples. And obviously we’re talking, you know, we’re always talking about flow, right. So how do we improve flow in manufacturing? Lean focuses on the flow of parts and reducing inventory. But what would you know, what would be the main lean focus for flow in the office? Would you say,
Tim Schipper
right, so in the office, we have to switch gears. And the way I think about it is information flow. So if you think about value streams in the office, whether it’s you know, paying an invoice or producing a quote to the customer, whatever it is, they’re typically some type of information flow, where there’s a request at the beginning and a whole series of steps that need to happen and then an output to the customer at the end. Sure. Once you look at how that information flows, or doesn’t flow along that value stream, you’re starting to get at where the waste sly as well.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. No, I think that’s a really great way to think about it. And obviously, you know, those that understand value stream mapping, know that, you know, we look at material flow and information flow and what you’re talking about here is the top side of a value stream map, which would be that that information flow piece, and, you know, what are all the inhibitors that that that are causing us to have, you know, maybe again, you know, extra processing or waste in that communication flow on the top side? Would you say that there are value streams in the office? What do you mean when we talk about value streams in the office?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, there’s absolutely value streams in the office, the example you cited a minute ago was this idea of I have a manufacturing flow. But then I also have an information flow, right right to support that manufacturing operation. That’s one type of value stream Sure, where there’s a series of things that have to happen could be given a schedule to the floor or confirming that something’s been scanned, or whatever it is, that’s the information flow, there are a whole series of value streams from some very big ones, like order to cash could be a very large one. Absolutely, the product development process would be a large value stream, the whole sales and marketing would be a high level value stream. But what I found is typically, those are too high or too large, actually to effectively map. So we dropped down a level or two and map sub level processes that cross multiple departments. And so that’s always my test to know if it’s a good value stream to map. It’s like, well, how many departments does it pass? Is it you know, 2345? And does it have handoffs along the way, and that’s a great opportunity to actually map the value stream. And if you do it that way, there are hundreds of small value streams like that in your company that I can guarantee are full of waste and could be improved by value.
Patrick Adams
what is your process? Or how do you go about mapping a process in the office? Is it is it different than how you would map a you know, a value stream in, you know, out in the manufacturing floor? Or is it very similar?
Tim Schipper
It’s pretty similar. So some of the same things, obviously, starting with the customer, or the customer demand, what are they looking for? And how many do they need? And when do they need it? And then following the steps through the value stream, so you understand how the information flows to supply that to the customer? Sure, same type of symbols, pretty much that you would use in manufacturing, there are just a couple ones, we add, sometimes. inventory is a little different than it is in manufacturing. Sure. So in manufacturing, typically, they show a triangle with an eye in it to indicate inventory. In the office, we typically show an inbox, like an old fashioned paper tray inbox. Yes, it gets people thinking about if you have an inbox or a backlog of things you’re supposed to do, that’s your inventory, right. So just little things like that.
Patrick Adams
I like that one of the one of the things that that, that I’ve seen in that I use, when mapping an administrative process is I do a combination of a Value Stream Map and a swim lane map where you have the cross functional areas listed along the left hand side and, and the map almost creates a bit of a V sometimes, you know, when you start with the customer, and and map through, still have a timeline along the bottom, but it just helps to see, you know, those who who are all those different cross functional areas that are involved in that particular value stream. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything like that before, but it’s definitely something that I’ve seen held.
Tim Schipper
Yeah, I’ve seen it done that way. And the other technique that I’ve used, and it almost always uses even if you use a swim lane map is an app out the communication paths, process steps. So how do people receive information to a particular step? And then what information do they give to others? And then show those communication paths on the map? Because generally, it’s in the whitespace, between the steps where you’re going to find a lot of the inefficiencies in the waste? Oh, absolutely.
Patrick Adams
That’s a great idea. I love that. And obviously, you know, there’s communication in itself, you know, there can be a ton of breakdowns, just based on us being human. And, you know, where are the misses there? And, and how can we make improvements to just the communication loops in general? So I love that. So in the office, I’m just curious to hear your thoughts. You know, obviously, I’ve been in multiple lean transformations, again, for many different companies in different industries and things but from your standpoint, being part of a lean transformation in the office, you know, there’s a lot of listeners that work in the office and are part of companies that maybe don’t have manufacturing tied to their businesses, but they do have office and transactional processes. So if they want to deploy a lean transformation and adopt lean methodology within their organization, how would someone start something like that?
Tim Schipper
Yeah. So if you want to start, you know, pick things that are close to the customer And pick things that are currently showing a lot of waste or showing problems with the customer. And then my recommendation is, start small, start with some small improvements or what you might call Kaizen, or, you know, small little incremental things that you can change, and then get people involved with continuous improvement. So that is really the key is getting that employee involvement with everybody on the team, and then start the team with, let’s generate some ideas and how we can fix this process. That’s right. That the big value stream projects you can do as well. But typically, those are longer term, it’s like you’re trying to go from a current state to a future state, that kind of the big transformation or in lean, we call it kaiku. Big thing that you’re trying to do, but I would really get teams to start small and say, What are the small improvements that we can do? Sure. You know, you mentioned at the start that I’m also involved with agile, this is one of the links between agile and lean. And if you hear Jeff Sutherland talk about it in his books, and in person, if you’ve listened to him, he really emphasizes this idea of in Agile they have the retrospectives right, where you’re looking back, and what’s the output of a retrospective? It’s the one or two things that you can work on to really improve your process. That’s right. So to me, that’s fundamental.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. What would you say? You mentioned engaging team members, do you have any tips or tricks or, you know, maybe just different ways that you would engage team members in the process in the beginning? Yeah, so
Tim Schipper
One of the best techniques I’ve seen comes out of the work of Al Robinson and Dean Schroeder. Okay. Idea driven. Yeah, a company and their stuff is great, because they talk about ways to build this culture into a team so that they’re generating ideas and making improvements. And so one of the great techniques that I found that works is creating some type of idea board, where you get everybody contributing to things that they want to fix. I love Paul Akers terminology, fix what bugs you right? So what is it about your process or your office environment, or, you know, the type of the way you’re doing the work that bugs you, and then have the team come up with ideas on how you might fix that? Absolutely.
Patrick Adams
One of the things that that, that I’ve seen companies do, and that we’ve kind of helped deploy in different organizations is some form of idea boards that make the ideas visual, but also, and there’s a couple of reasons why that’s important, but also limit, you know, maybe the because there’s only so much capacity that a team has, you know, for implementing ideas, right, and not that you want to, you know, not not that you want to turn off the idea, the idea system, but you know, what you don’t want to happen is you don’t want to turn it on, and have an influx of ideas come in, that one person is responsible to implement and can only get to two or three of them, and the other ones just sit out there for months and months, and nothing ever happens. Right? So I think, you know, organizations have to be a little bit careful about just implementing a suggestion box or, you know, opening the floodgates for these ideas to just start flowing in with nobody to implement them. I don’t know, if you have any thoughts on that, or ways that you’ve, you know, helped to, you know, deploy suggestion boards or anything where it kinda constricts? Or create action right away to help implement those?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, a couple thoughts. The first thing you’re talking about is reducing the width or the working process, right? So it’s a great idea to work with the team to say, okay, we’re not expecting to implement all these ideas at once. It’s like, take a few per week, you know, Toyota is way out there. As far as you know, 100 implemented ideas per employee per year. That’s an incredible target yesterday. But you know, can they get one or two per employee per week, and kind of set that expectation. The other thing to emphasize is, as you mentioned, this is not a suggestion box, this is not writing my ID on a card and putting it in a box and then
Patrick Adams
having somebody else implement it for me.
Tim Schipper
Exactly. It’s not that this is about empowering the team, yes, working ideas that they can, they can improve. And so when they first start out, you have to kind of coach them through that and say, Okay, we’re not looking for the big ideas, right? We’re looking for the things that are in your control. And we’re empowering you to actually go and fix these things. If they come up with things that are bigger or maybe involve another team. You’re going to capture those we’re going to put them in a parking lot. Because you’re really looking for the things that the team can work on themselves. That’s right.
Patrick Adams
No, I think that’s a great point. Because, you know, we started out the conversation talking about how do you engage people in that process? That’s right. So it’s not about someone just turning something in and hoping someone else takes care of it. And I’ve seen a lot of organizations that have this one continuous improvement practitioner that’s, you know, got a stack of 40 or 50 ideas on his or her desk, and he’s running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to get it done. Right. And that’s not that’s not true, sustainable. A true sustainable way of deploying, you know, an idea system or an idea board, you need to involve the people that are closest to the work, the ones that are saying this bugs me, because they’re the ones that know more about that than you, right? If I go out there and say, Hey, I saw this, this idea, or this, this problem card turned in? And here’s the solution, and I go out and I implement it, you know that? Is that really going to be sustainable, right? It’s my solution, it’s not their solution. So we need to gather information from the team members and having them be involved in the process of implementing improvement ideas, and these don’t have to be big, like, you know, huge improvement ideas that take a lot of money or take a lot of time, right? These could be very simple things. You know, Paul Akers, we talked about Paul earlier, but he talks about the two second improvement, really simple things. Right,
Tim Schipper
right. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I would say is, the person who comes up with the idea doesn’t have to be the implementer. Anybody on the team can make that change and, and help out to make some meaningful change on the team. Absolutely. Another technique that I’d suggest is let the team manage that process themselves. You may put a coach alongside of them a lien coach, to kind of help them through it, but you really want them to own the process, so that they are running their weekly improvement meeting. They’re doing the report outs of what they improved, and they are deciding what on the list they’re going to work on next. And who’s going to work on it?
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. I love that. What would you say from a coach’s standpoint? What should the involvement be? What should a coach be doing when a team has a list of ideas that they’re working on?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, so always with a lean coach, it’s about establishing a safe environment. And I tell people this all the time that the culture of lean is very different for a lot of companies, because you’re exposing waste, you’re exposing problems. And people can be very uncomfortable with that. In you know, Toyota calls it the culture of red ware, if I’m going to put a metric up, and it’s showing red, in most organizations, that’s a warning sign and everybody runs away, right. And I was doing some lean work with a local college, and we were putting our project plans on the wall, right. And this was very foreign to them. So they did not want to show a project plan that was red. And what they were missing is this idea that lean. Red is okay, that’s right. Exposing problems is okay. Yes. So, you know, the first job of any lean coach is to say, we can show our problems we want to know, because it goes back to the respect for people for lean, right? It’s like, I’m not respecting my people, if I have waste in the process, and I’m not respecting my co workers, if there’s waste in the process, absolutely. No, the idea is, it’s okay to expose the waste, because what we’re going to do is we’re going to work on it.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. So true. And you’re talking about exposing the waist, which is obviously, you know, making it visible, right, making problems visible, which is also, you know, we talked about visual management in the lean world. And, you know, I’m just curious to hear in the office, what are some examples of visuals that could be used to expose waste or visuals that could be used for daily management, or whatever it might be, you know, what are the visuals that you use? Or that you see, you know, in the office space?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, the most common one, just generically, if you talk about it is exposing the backlog of work. And how late is the work getting done on time? Usually what we find in the office, if we look at the processes, the backlog of work isn’t prioritized. Sure times at all. It’s usually the latest in the loudest that’s getting work done. That’s right. And that means they’re not working to the true customer demand, you know, what, what are the customers need? And when do they want it? And so if you can expose the backlog, and then bring the teams together to work on that backlog, that’s what you want to do. So just a little example, I did a little work with the West Michigan employment agency, and they were trying to match job seekers with what they called a business relationship manager. Okay. And so we have a person who’s working with the businesses trying to go out and find out what jobs are needed or they need welders the day the nurses aides, do they need some light manufacturing, what do they need? And then you have the job seekers or what’s the They’re coming in with. And so one of the techniques that we use, there was let’s just expose that list like, Who are my job seekers? What are the skills that they need? Who are my businesses? And what are the skills that they are hiring? Right? And how do we put the two together? That’s right. So showing the backlog, what’s out there? What are you actually working on?
Patrick Adams
I love that. That’s a, that’s a great example of a visual, a good visual other visuals that you see, you know, I just think of, I spent some time down in Mexico with a company, and they were putting up visual boards that they were using for their daily huddles. And, you know, one of the questions that we asked was, how do you define success for your day? And, you know, we really had to challenge them and push them to think about, you know, what, what should we be measuring? What should we be looking at in the office, that could give us a, you know, a feeling of having success at the end of the day, because a lot of us work through the day, and we’re, you know, we feel like we’re busy, and we’re, you know, possibly filling our day with firefighting and, you know, getting pulled in 15 different directions. And then at the end of the day, you’re like, What, did I even get done today? I don’t, I feel like I worked really hard. But what did I have a good day or not? You know, so that was one of the challenges that we had for them. And they put together some really, really great visual boards to measure, you know, their success for the day. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything like that out there, or any other types of visuals for daily management?
Tim Schipper
Yeah. So at a team level, obviously, you’re looking at improvements made and what improvements have been made. There’s this element of lean education in your stand up meetings. So you’re talking about Lean principles and teaching about wastes? And what are the things that you’ve done to eliminate waste. And so then you’re looking for how we drive in any metrics that we might be measuring, whether it’s around delivery, or productivity or quality. So much like in manufacturing, most lean companies will measure safety, quality, delivery and cost, right? So kind of the same general things. But if it’s a team, you’re driving those metrics down with the team level, safety is a hard one for people to translate to the office. Yeah, right. safety needs something very specific in manufacturing. It’s like, I don’t want any near misses. I don’t want any injuries. I certainly don’t want any OSHA record. But in the office, safety is more around, you know, safety is all about people. Sure. Right. And so when you bring it to the office, it’s also about people, you know, are there any risks for the team? Or is the team happy? And you know, what’s the happiness indicator of this team? That’s right. And, and then when you talk about quality, obviously, in the office, you try not to introduce defects. So if a particular team is struggling with quality, you’re going to want to measure that defect level that they might be introducing downstream in the process. Absolutely. And hopefully, not all the way down to the customer.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. That’s right. And in the office, sometimes the customer, you know, it could be an internal customer, right for an office team. So understanding who your customers are? Right, and, and how, what’s going to make them feel like, you know, you’re providing them with the value that they that they need, is important in helping to define what those metrics might be that you’re that you’re measuring.
Tim Schipper
Right? Yeah, one of my one of my aha moments, it surprised me every time it happens is if you get a whole group of people from different departments together in a value stream mapping session, and you put all the process steps on the wall, talk about the communications back and forth. I’ve had many times where people would say, Oh, this is the first time I’ve ever talked to so and so. Right. Right. I send them emails, but I’ve never met them. Yeah. It’s like, oh, timeout, right. Yeah, that’s why we’re together. We want to know, and, and then what part of my work might be introducing defects, something that they correct, further downstream?
Patrick Adams<
Yes. There are so many problems that come with that kind of that silo mentality or that in that mentality, because, you know, a lot of times it’s not, it’s not intentional, and sometimes it just takes some some intentionality to introduce those departments together or, you know, bring them together in some way to you know, walk the value stream together and talk about the different impacts that they have on each other. So, you know, something as as you know, listeners are thinking through this, you know, do you do you see any silos, you know, are there anybody on either side of you, suppliers to you, internal suppliers to you, internal customers, or external either way, but that you feel like, you know, we might have a silo, we may need to break that down and have some conversations about opportunities to improve.
Tim Schipper
So, one of the most elegant definitions of lean I’ve heard came from Jim Womack at a conference. He said, lean is thinking horizontal Lee across the verticals. So I like those verticals. Are those silos? Yes. Those are the functions. And thinking horizontally means I’m thinking as a value stream across those different silos. That’s right. And I thought, man that’s so elegant thinking horizontally across the verticals.
Patrick Adams br>
It is. I know, I really liked that definition. I appreciate you sharing that with us, Tim. So this has been great. I love talking through, you know, lean in the office. And I know there’s I know, there’s listeners out there that this has been very beneficial for them to think about, you know, how do some of these, you know, these lean tools and techniques? And just the methodology? How can it apply in the office and not just in manufacturing? Right. So I really appreciate you coming on today, Tim, and sharing some of these, some of these little aha is with us. I appreciate that. We got my pleasure. Yeah. And if someone wanted to, you know, get a hold of one of your books, innovative lean development, or the highly effective office, are those out on Amazon?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, they are. They’re both published by productivity press. Okay. And they are available on Amazon. So you can find them on Amazon.
Patrick Adams
Perfect. Okay. So in the highly effective office, obviously, that one’s going to tie in directly with our conversation with the conversation that we had today. I’m guessing. I haven’t read it yet.
Tim Schipper
I’m looking forward to it. Yeah, that is it’s very much about the office, many of these topics that we’ve been talking about. I go into depth in that book on how to address those perfectly. The previous book, innovative lean development, was around how to apply lean to your product development processes. So that’s a whole nother podcast we could do.
Patrick Adams
Yeah, I would love it. Well, I’ll have to have you back on, you know, fairly soon, and we can dive into lean product development. I know that’s an area for a lot of people that they would probably love to hear about. So yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for being on Tim. Thank you, Patrick. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the line solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Welcome to the lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams and I have a special guest with us today. His name is Tim Schipper. And Tim is the author of innovative lean development and the highly effective office. Tim has also served on the board for the lean product and process development exchange, which is an organization promoting the exchange of information between companies in the areas of lean product and lean process development. He’s also an agile and lean expert, teacher and coach. Welcome to the show, Tim.
Tim Schipper
Thank you, Patrick. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. Now, I’m excited to dive in today we’re going to be talking about lean in the office. And Tim works at a local company here in West Michigan. And he and I have met a few times. And I know some of the work that you do, Tim, is obviously on the administrative side or the office side of things, sometimes people tend to tie lean to, you know, manufacturing or making widgets, right. So it makes sense that that would be what we would discuss, but in reality, lean can be applied in industry, in any industry at any team, and most definitely in the office. And so I’m excited to kind of dive in and chat with you a little bit about how lean can be implemented in the office. So what would you say when you think about lean in the office? How does it compare to manufacturing?
Tim Schipper<
So manufacturing, lean is a little more straightforward than it is in the office. Obviously, that’s where lean was applied. First, it came out of Toyota. And they applied all the Lean principles and actually learned it, interestingly enough from some of the people that went over there, like Deming and others. But, you know, on the concrete floor, I always say it’s a lot different than on the carpeted floor of the office. When you’re out on the concrete floor, one of the big differences is you can go to the floor, and you can see the product being made. You can see whether or not it’s flowing. And you can easily spot the waste, you can see the inventory piling up or you can see people transporting parts around the floor. So it’s very different from the office where the process is for the most part hidden. It’s not visible.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. Yeah. And it can be much more difficult to identify waste in the office. Well, but it is there, right? It’s just a different waste, right? Absolutely.
Tim Schipper
If you work in an office, you know that one of the key ways is waiting. Sure. Sure. Like manufacturing. So we wait for responses, we wait for answers. And you know, a lot of people rely on email to get things done in the office, right? I call email, just a giant push system. Right? There’s nothing pulled about it. Because if I’m sending an email to somebody, I don’t know when they’re going to read it. I don’t know when they’re going to respond to it. And I’m just waiting for that response to come back. So you know, the communication techniques in the office can be just ripe with waste.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. And there’s so many other examples too. And I’m sure we’ll talk about a few of these, but I always think about, you know, when you look at excess processing, I think about approvals, right? It’s the It’s like my pet peeve when you see, you know, three or four different levels of approvals. And you have to ask yourself, Is this necessary, you know, or is it a waste? You know, it’s it’s it I’m sure it depends on the situation, right, but how many different levels of approvals are needed and then you know, how much waiting is happening because there’s email approvals that are, you know, sent out to different people. And then oh, someone’s on vacation. So they’re not checking their email. And now we have to wait even longer for them to come back. So that’s one of the ways in the office that I always think, man, if we could only reduce the number of approvals.
Tim Schipper<
Yeah. So the, the favorite question I ask people, when I see a lot of approvals in a process is how many times have they actually declined your request? Many times have they not approved it? And usually you get an answer, like, well, 99% of the time it’s approved, right? And it’s like, why do you go through the approval process? Or is there another thing you can put into place to empower the people at the next level down to make the choice on them? You know, for themselves? Can you put some type of budget limit on it or whatever? Sure. And the other thing I always say to people is, if if you’re relying on an approval processes, try to make it more of a pull system, so that they know what’s coming, that when they get it, they know they have to respond, you can timebox it and put it into a certain window. So you’re not waiting forever for those approvals.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. The other thing that I tend to see, too, is a lot of motion waste in the office. And, you know, people tend to say, you know, well, it’s only it’s only a little bit of time, you know, for me to go find a calculator or for me to walk over to the printer, and back, you know, but then when you if you start to do some time studies, and you really look at the the amount of time that it takes, you know, sure it’s just a little bit of time for that one incident. But what if you multiply that across three or four people, you know, five days a week, and then 52 weeks out of the year that that small amount of time is going to add up very quickly. And it actually becomes a large amount of time that we’re just paying people to walk back and forth. Do you see? Exactly.
Tim Schipper
let’s see a lot of that motion anytime you need to move from one place to another, to the copier, or to go and talk to somebody or to a meeting. Anytime you’re walking anywhere, that’s motion. I personally love standup desks, because it eliminates that time from standing up or sitting down and getting to go, I actually have a stand up desk here at home too. Or I stay for most of the day. And I think it’s a waste just to be sitting and then you know, having to get up and go someplace that it kind of sometimes prevents you from even wanting to get up, right? It’s like, oh, get up.
Patrick Adams
First, I hear you there any
Tim Schipper
more time. It’s like there’s no delay between going and doing it. Right.
Patrick Adams
The older I get, the more that my knees start to you know, I’ll just sit here for another hour.
Tim Schipper
Right? Exactly. Yeah, you know, it’s motions, one of those examples where it applies to all the ways to manufacturing, we have to translate them to the office, people don’t think of them as easily as you think about the ones in the office. So you know, motion in the plants, or in the manufacturing setting on the concrete floors, we know what that looks like, that’s people moving around picking up a tool or going to get parts or going to get paperwork, whatever that is. But, when you say motion to the people in the office or transportation, you know, what does that mean? You know, transportation is, I always say, anything was wings and wheels in manufacturing, right, if I gotta move it by wheels are by wings as transportation. Right? So you know, you have to even kind of spell it out in the office like, well, it’s going to meetings, that’s motion if you have to travel to a meeting, right? That’s right, that’s wasted motion and time.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. And while it can be more difficult to identify the waste is definitely there. So I appreciate the examples. And obviously we’re talking, you know, we’re always talking about flow, right. So how do we improve flow in manufacturing? Lean focuses on the flow of parts and reducing inventory. But what would you know, what would be the main lean focus for flow in the office? Would you say,
Tim Schipper
right, so in the office, we have to switch gears. And the way I think about it is information flow. So if you think about value streams in the office, whether it’s you know, paying an invoice or producing a quote to the customer, whatever it is, they’re typically some type of information flow, where there’s a request at the beginning and a whole series of steps that need to happen and then an output to the customer at the end. Sure. Once you look at how that information flows, or doesn’t flow along that value stream, you’re starting to get at where the waste sly as well.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. No, I think that’s a really great way to think about it. And obviously, you know, those that understand value stream mapping, know that, you know, we look at material flow and information flow and what you’re talking about here is the top side of a value stream map, which would be that that information flow piece, and, you know, what are all the inhibitors that that that are causing us to have, you know, maybe again, you know, extra processing or waste in that communication flow on the top side? Would you say that there are value streams in the office? What do you mean when we talk about value streams in the office?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, there’s absolutely value streams in the office, the example you cited a minute ago was this idea of I have a manufacturing flow. But then I also have an information flow, right right to support that manufacturing operation. That’s one type of value stream Sure, where there’s a series of things that have to happen could be given a schedule to the floor or confirming that something’s been scanned, or whatever it is, that’s the information flow, there are a whole series of value streams from some very big ones, like order to cash could be a very large one. Absolutely, the product development process would be a large value stream, the whole sales and marketing would be a high level value stream. But what I found is typically, those are too high or too large, actually to effectively map. So we dropped down a level or two and map sub level processes that cross multiple departments. And so that’s always my test to know if it’s a good value stream to map. It’s like, well, how many departments does it pass? Is it you know, 2345? And does it have handoffs along the way, and that’s a great opportunity to actually map the value stream. And if you do it that way, there are hundreds of small value streams like that in your company that I can guarantee are full of waste and could be improved by value.
Patrick Adams
what is your process? Or how do you go about mapping a process in the office? Is it is it different than how you would map a you know, a value stream in, you know, out in the manufacturing floor? Or is it very similar?
Tim Schipper
It’s pretty similar. So some of the same things, obviously, starting with the customer, or the customer demand, what are they looking for? And how many do they need? And when do they need it? And then following the steps through the value stream, so you understand how the information flows to supply that to the customer? Sure, same type of symbols, pretty much that you would use in manufacturing, there are just a couple ones, we add, sometimes. inventory is a little different than it is in manufacturing. Sure. So in manufacturing, typically, they show a triangle with an eye in it to indicate inventory. In the office, we typically show an inbox, like an old fashioned paper tray inbox. Yes, it gets people thinking about if you have an inbox or a backlog of things you’re supposed to do, that’s your inventory, right. So just little things like that.
Patrick Adams
I like that one of the one of the things that that, that I’ve seen in that I use, when mapping an administrative process is I do a combination of a Value Stream Map and a swim lane map where you have the cross functional areas listed along the left hand side and, and the map almost creates a bit of a V sometimes, you know, when you start with the customer, and and map through, still have a timeline along the bottom, but it just helps to see, you know, those who who are all those different cross functional areas that are involved in that particular value stream. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything like that before, but it’s definitely something that I’ve seen held.
Tim Schipper
Yeah, I’ve seen it done that way. And the other technique that I’ve used, and it almost always uses even if you use a swim lane map is an app out the communication paths, process steps. So how do people receive information to a particular step? And then what information do they give to others? And then show those communication paths on the map? Because generally, it’s in the whitespace, between the steps where you’re going to find a lot of the inefficiencies in the waste? Oh, absolutely.
Patrick Adams
That’s a great idea. I love that. And obviously, you know, there’s communication in itself, you know, there can be a ton of breakdowns, just based on us being human. And, you know, where are the misses there? And, and how can we make improvements to just the communication loops in general? So I love that. So in the office, I’m just curious to hear your thoughts. You know, obviously, I’ve been in multiple lean transformations, again, for many different companies in different industries and things but from your standpoint, being part of a lean transformation in the office, you know, there’s a lot of listeners that work in the office and are part of companies that maybe don’t have manufacturing tied to their businesses, but they do have office and transactional processes. So if they want to deploy a lean transformation and adopt lean methodology within their organization, how would someone start something like that?
Tim Schipper
Yeah. So if you want to start, you know, pick things that are close to the customer And pick things that are currently showing a lot of waste or showing problems with the customer. And then my recommendation is, start small, start with some small improvements or what you might call Kaizen, or, you know, small little incremental things that you can change, and then get people involved with continuous improvement. So that is really the key is getting that employee involvement with everybody on the team, and then start the team with, let’s generate some ideas and how we can fix this process. That’s right. That the big value stream projects you can do as well. But typically, those are longer term, it’s like you’re trying to go from a current state to a future state, that kind of the big transformation or in lean, we call it kaiku. Big thing that you’re trying to do, but I would really get teams to start small and say, What are the small improvements that we can do? Sure. You know, you mentioned at the start that I’m also involved with agile, this is one of the links between agile and lean. And if you hear Jeff Sutherland talk about it in his books, and in person, if you’ve listened to him, he really emphasizes this idea of in Agile they have the retrospectives right, where you’re looking back, and what’s the output of a retrospective? It’s the one or two things that you can work on to really improve your process. That’s right. So to me, that’s fundamental.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. What would you say? You mentioned engaging team members, do you have any tips or tricks or, you know, maybe just different ways that you would engage team members in the process in the beginning? Yeah, so
Tim Schipper
One of the best techniques I’ve seen comes out of the work of Al Robinson and Dean Schroeder. Okay. Idea driven. Yeah, a company and their stuff is great, because they talk about ways to build this culture into a team so that they’re generating ideas and making improvements. And so one of the great techniques that I found that works is creating some type of idea board, where you get everybody contributing to things that they want to fix. I love Paul Akers terminology, fix what bugs you right? So what is it about your process or your office environment, or, you know, the type of the way you’re doing the work that bugs you, and then have the team come up with ideas on how you might fix that? Absolutely.
Patrick Adams
One of the things that that, that I’ve seen companies do, and that we’ve kind of helped deploy in different organizations is some form of idea boards that make the ideas visual, but also, and there’s a couple of reasons why that’s important, but also limit, you know, maybe the because there’s only so much capacity that a team has, you know, for implementing ideas, right, and not that you want to, you know, not not that you want to turn off the idea, the idea system, but you know, what you don’t want to happen is you don’t want to turn it on, and have an influx of ideas come in, that one person is responsible to implement and can only get to two or three of them, and the other ones just sit out there for months and months, and nothing ever happens. Right? So I think, you know, organizations have to be a little bit careful about just implementing a suggestion box or, you know, opening the floodgates for these ideas to just start flowing in with nobody to implement them. I don’t know, if you have any thoughts on that, or ways that you’ve, you know, helped to, you know, deploy suggestion boards or anything where it kinda constricts? Or create action right away to help implement those?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, a couple thoughts. The first thing you’re talking about is reducing the width or the working process, right? So it’s a great idea to work with the team to say, okay, we’re not expecting to implement all these ideas at once. It’s like, take a few per week, you know, Toyota is way out there. As far as you know, 100 implemented ideas per employee per year. That’s an incredible target yesterday. But you know, can they get one or two per employee per week, and kind of set that expectation. The other thing to emphasize is, as you mentioned, this is not a suggestion box, this is not writing my ID on a card and putting it in a box and then
Patrick Adams
having somebody else implement it for me.
Tim Schipper
Exactly. It’s not that this is about empowering the team, yes, working ideas that they can, they can improve. And so when they first start out, you have to kind of coach them through that and say, Okay, we’re not looking for the big ideas, right? We’re looking for the things that are in your control. And we’re empowering you to actually go and fix these things. If they come up with things that are bigger or maybe involve another team. You’re going to capture those we’re going to put them in a parking lot. Because you’re really looking for the things that the team can work on themselves. That’s right.
Patrick Adams
No, I think that’s a great point. Because, you know, we started out the conversation talking about how do you engage people in that process? That’s right. So it’s not about someone just turning something in and hoping someone else takes care of it. And I’ve seen a lot of organizations that have this one continuous improvement practitioner that’s, you know, got a stack of 40 or 50 ideas on his or her desk, and he’s running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to get it done. Right. And that’s not that’s not true, sustainable. A true sustainable way of deploying, you know, an idea system or an idea board, you need to involve the people that are closest to the work, the ones that are saying this bugs me, because they’re the ones that know more about that than you, right? If I go out there and say, Hey, I saw this, this idea, or this, this problem card turned in? And here’s the solution, and I go out and I implement it, you know that? Is that really going to be sustainable, right? It’s my solution, it’s not their solution. So we need to gather information from the team members and having them be involved in the process of implementing improvement ideas, and these don’t have to be big, like, you know, huge improvement ideas that take a lot of money or take a lot of time, right? These could be very simple things. You know, Paul Akers, we talked about Paul earlier, but he talks about the two second improvement, really simple things. Right,
Tim Schipper
right. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I would say is, the person who comes up with the idea doesn’t have to be the implementer. Anybody on the team can make that change and, and help out to make some meaningful change on the team. Absolutely. Another technique that I’d suggest is let the team manage that process themselves. You may put a coach alongside of them a lien coach, to kind of help them through it, but you really want them to own the process, so that they are running their weekly improvement meeting. They’re doing the report outs of what they improved, and they are deciding what on the list they’re going to work on next. And who’s going to work on it?
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. I love that. What would you say from a coach’s standpoint? What should the involvement be? What should a coach be doing when a team has a list of ideas that they’re working on?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, so always with a lean coach, it’s about establishing a safe environment. And I tell people this all the time that the culture of lean is very different for a lot of companies, because you’re exposing waste, you’re exposing problems. And people can be very uncomfortable with that. In you know, Toyota calls it the culture of red ware, if I’m going to put a metric up, and it’s showing red, in most organizations, that’s a warning sign and everybody runs away, right. And I was doing some lean work with a local college, and we were putting our project plans on the wall, right. And this was very foreign to them. So they did not want to show a project plan that was red. And what they were missing is this idea that lean. Red is okay, that’s right. Exposing problems is okay. Yes. So, you know, the first job of any lean coach is to say, we can show our problems we want to know, because it goes back to the respect for people for lean, right? It’s like, I’m not respecting my people, if I have waste in the process, and I’m not respecting my co workers, if there’s waste in the process, absolutely. No, the idea is, it’s okay to expose the waste, because what we’re going to do is we’re going to work on it.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. So true. And you’re talking about exposing the waist, which is obviously, you know, making it visible, right, making problems visible, which is also, you know, we talked about visual management in the lean world. And, you know, I’m just curious to hear in the office, what are some examples of visuals that could be used to expose waste or visuals that could be used for daily management, or whatever it might be, you know, what are the visuals that you use? Or that you see, you know, in the office space?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, the most common one, just generically, if you talk about it is exposing the backlog of work. And how late is the work getting done on time? Usually what we find in the office, if we look at the processes, the backlog of work isn’t prioritized. Sure times at all. It’s usually the latest in the loudest that’s getting work done. That’s right. And that means they’re not working to the true customer demand, you know, what, what are the customers need? And when do they want it? And so if you can expose the backlog, and then bring the teams together to work on that backlog, that’s what you want to do. So just a little example, I did a little work with the West Michigan employment agency, and they were trying to match job seekers with what they called a business relationship manager. Okay. And so we have a person who’s working with the businesses trying to go out and find out what jobs are needed or they need welders the day the nurses aides, do they need some light manufacturing, what do they need? And then you have the job seekers or what’s the They’re coming in with. And so one of the techniques that we use, there was let’s just expose that list like, Who are my job seekers? What are the skills that they need? Who are my businesses? And what are the skills that they are hiring? Right? And how do we put the two together? That’s right. So showing the backlog, what’s out there? What are you actually working on?
Patrick Adams
I love that. That’s a, that’s a great example of a visual, a good visual other visuals that you see, you know, I just think of, I spent some time down in Mexico with a company, and they were putting up visual boards that they were using for their daily huddles. And, you know, one of the questions that we asked was, how do you define success for your day? And, you know, we really had to challenge them and push them to think about, you know, what, what should we be measuring? What should we be looking at in the office, that could give us a, you know, a feeling of having success at the end of the day, because a lot of us work through the day, and we’re, you know, we feel like we’re busy, and we’re, you know, possibly filling our day with firefighting and, you know, getting pulled in 15 different directions. And then at the end of the day, you’re like, What, did I even get done today? I don’t, I feel like I worked really hard. But what did I have a good day or not? You know, so that was one of the challenges that we had for them. And they put together some really, really great visual boards to measure, you know, their success for the day. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything like that out there, or any other types of visuals for daily management?
Tim Schipper
Yeah. So at a team level, obviously, you’re looking at improvements made and what improvements have been made. There’s this element of lean education in your stand up meetings. So you’re talking about Lean principles and teaching about wastes? And what are the things that you’ve done to eliminate waste. And so then you’re looking for how we drive in any metrics that we might be measuring, whether it’s around delivery, or productivity or quality. So much like in manufacturing, most lean companies will measure safety, quality, delivery and cost, right? So kind of the same general things. But if it’s a team, you’re driving those metrics down with the team level, safety is a hard one for people to translate to the office. Yeah, right. safety needs something very specific in manufacturing. It’s like, I don’t want any near misses. I don’t want any injuries. I certainly don’t want any OSHA record. But in the office, safety is more around, you know, safety is all about people. Sure. Right. And so when you bring it to the office, it’s also about people, you know, are there any risks for the team? Or is the team happy? And you know, what’s the happiness indicator of this team? That’s right. And, and then when you talk about quality, obviously, in the office, you try not to introduce defects. So if a particular team is struggling with quality, you’re going to want to measure that defect level that they might be introducing downstream in the process. Absolutely. And hopefully, not all the way down to the customer.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. That’s right. And in the office, sometimes the customer, you know, it could be an internal customer, right for an office team. So understanding who your customers are? Right, and, and how, what’s going to make them feel like, you know, you’re providing them with the value that they that they need, is important in helping to define what those metrics might be that you’re that you’re measuring.
Tim Schipper
Right? Yeah, one of my one of my aha moments, it surprised me every time it happens is if you get a whole group of people from different departments together in a value stream mapping session, and you put all the process steps on the wall, talk about the communications back and forth. I’ve had many times where people would say, Oh, this is the first time I’ve ever talked to so and so. Right. Right. I send them emails, but I’ve never met them. Yeah. It’s like, oh, timeout, right. Yeah, that’s why we’re together. We want to know, and, and then what part of my work might be introducing defects, something that they correct, further downstream?
Patrick Adams<
Yes. There are so many problems that come with that kind of that silo mentality or that in that mentality, because, you know, a lot of times it’s not, it’s not intentional, and sometimes it just takes some some intentionality to introduce those departments together or, you know, bring them together in some way to you know, walk the value stream together and talk about the different impacts that they have on each other. So, you know, something as as you know, listeners are thinking through this, you know, do you do you see any silos, you know, are there anybody on either side of you, suppliers to you, internal suppliers to you, internal customers, or external either way, but that you feel like, you know, we might have a silo, we may need to break that down and have some conversations about opportunities to improve.
Tim Schipper
So, one of the most elegant definitions of lean I’ve heard came from Jim Womack at a conference. He said, lean is thinking horizontal Lee across the verticals. So I like those verticals. Are those silos? Yes. Those are the functions. And thinking horizontally means I’m thinking as a value stream across those different silos. That’s right. And I thought, man that’s so elegant thinking horizontally across the verticals.
Patrick Adams br>
It is. I know, I really liked that definition. I appreciate you sharing that with us, Tim. So this has been great. I love talking through, you know, lean in the office. And I know there’s I know, there’s listeners out there that this has been very beneficial for them to think about, you know, how do some of these, you know, these lean tools and techniques? And just the methodology? How can it apply in the office and not just in manufacturing? Right. So I really appreciate you coming on today, Tim, and sharing some of these, some of these little aha is with us. I appreciate that. We got my pleasure. Yeah. And if someone wanted to, you know, get a hold of one of your books, innovative lean development, or the highly effective office, are those out on Amazon?
Tim Schipper
Yeah, they are. They’re both published by productivity press. Okay. And they are available on Amazon. So you can find them on Amazon.
Patrick Adams
Perfect. Okay. So in the highly effective office, obviously, that one’s going to tie in directly with our conversation with the conversation that we had today. I’m guessing. I haven’t read it yet.
Tim Schipper
I’m looking forward to it. Yeah, that is it’s very much about the office, many of these topics that we’ve been talking about. I go into depth in that book on how to address those perfectly. The previous book, innovative lean development, was around how to apply lean to your product development processes. So that’s a whole nother podcast we could do.
Patrick Adams
Yeah, I would love it. Well, I’ll have to have you back on, you know, fairly soon, and we can dive into lean product development. I know that’s an area for a lot of people that they would probably love to hear about. So yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for being on Tim. Thank you, Patrick. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the line solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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