Lean disciplines may have originated on the shop floor; but, they can also be applied in the front office and this is where the next frontier of productivity gains will take place. Growth in outsourcing and the shortening of product life cycles mean that more and more value is added to a product in the front office. Engineer-to-order and project-centric businesses, in particular, are vulnerable to efficiency drains in the front office, and companies that contract out a significant percentage of their manufacturing processes will also have increased demands placed on administrative functions, making front office lean absolutely critical.
In an earlier article, we dealt with some basic approaches to front-office lean. In this article, we'll focus on one often-overlooked tool for facilitating front-office lean—business modeler software that is tightly integrated with an enterprise application. Business modeler software can help to identify non-value-added steps in a front office process, but by using it to automate processes it can—in and of itself—eliminate non-value added steps.
Hidden waste
There is a hidden waste that many executives do not discuss or may not even know about.
This is the waste that comes from a lack of clarity of what the company's current business processes are, or from poorly—defined or inadequately documented processes. In a front office environment, people in administrative and managerial roles may ask each other, their managers, or even the people who work for them, "how do we open a purchase order?" or "what is our process for an engineering change order?" Conversations like this may take 10 to 15 minutes, and might happen dozens or even hundreds of times a day, depending on the organization. Various people in the organization may have been trained to undertake these processes in a variety of ways, and employees may wind up discussing the relative merits of how a process is currently undertaken and how the same process may have been completed in years past.
Even if you are reasonably efficient in manufacturing, think of how much time you are wasting on interactions like these in the office. Moreover, if processes are not documented clearly, how much time and expense is wasted by training new hires in processes that may not be optimal? The need to train and retrain people because their initial training may not have reflected current processes is one indicator that a company ought to consider business modeler software.
Another indicator that business modeler software could be helpful is a periodic or frequent need to redo front office tasks because managers and employees were trained incorrectly or because there is no established, effective procedure for taking care of business tasks.
If, in the course of conducting business, the following questions are asked with any degree of regularity, business modeler software may be required in order to facilitate leaner operations:
* How do we do this?
* Why do we do it this way?
* Isn't there a better way?
How does business modeling help?
The genius of business modeler software is that it helps to reduce waste throughout your organization in a number of ways. First of all, it standardizes processes and then documents them. The business model then describes how you do things and puts that descriptive data in a common repository. Whether you are filling in for an associate who is away and have to learn a new functional area of the company or are training a new hire, your process information is standardized, accessible, and packaged for easy learning.
Business modeler software also facilitates process change management and improvement because it contains a history of how things have been done in the past and the reasons for adopting new processes over time. This history of the business models as they developed, what was done in the past and why processes were changed will help you avoid wasting time and resources by reverting to a process that you had earlier abandoned because you found them to be suboptimal.
If attempts at process change in your organization prompt comments along the lines of "we tried it that way years ago and it didn't work," business modeler software will certainly help. Only by recording and studying history can you avoid reliving it.
Another powerful aspect of business modeler software is that, if it is properly integrated with the enterprise IT environment, it is not just a training tool or a tool for senior managers; rather, it's a tool for daily use by hands-on system users. People using an enterprise software tool are using a system and therefore need a systematic approach for doing things on that computer system. The model would likely be most useful in the longer term for those who use a system only periodically, and, therefore, do not have the opportunity to rapidly master the system. Ideally, the model is not just for training, but for actual use until the processes contained in the model become second nature. Over time, the model is used less and less to guide workers as they follow processes on a daily basis. This means that when it is part and parcel of the overall enterprise software environment, business modeler software can guide front-office processes ranging from scheduling, materials planning, finance, quality, customer service, and other disciplines in a manner similar to visual cues and other methods used on the shop floor.
Business modeler software can streamline processes wherever there are a number of things to attend to; and by doing them in the proper way in the proper order, workers can reduce non-value-added steps. The fact that these processes are well-documented and centrally archived means that even after processes are learned thoroughly and the model is no longer being used as a daily guide, users can refer to it occasionally as a way to re-orient themselves on key processes.
In an earlier article, we dealt with some basic approaches to front-office lean. In this article, we'll focus on one often-overlooked tool for facilitating front-office lean—business modeler software that is tightly integrated with an enterprise application. Business modeler software can help to identify non-value-added steps in a front office process, but by using it to automate processes it can—in and of itself—eliminate non-value added steps.
Hidden waste
There is a hidden waste that many executives do not discuss or may not even know about.
This is the waste that comes from a lack of clarity of what the company's current business processes are, or from poorly—defined or inadequately documented processes. In a front office environment, people in administrative and managerial roles may ask each other, their managers, or even the people who work for them, "how do we open a purchase order?" or "what is our process for an engineering change order?" Conversations like this may take 10 to 15 minutes, and might happen dozens or even hundreds of times a day, depending on the organization. Various people in the organization may have been trained to undertake these processes in a variety of ways, and employees may wind up discussing the relative merits of how a process is currently undertaken and how the same process may have been completed in years past.
Even if you are reasonably efficient in manufacturing, think of how much time you are wasting on interactions like these in the office. Moreover, if processes are not documented clearly, how much time and expense is wasted by training new hires in processes that may not be optimal? The need to train and retrain people because their initial training may not have reflected current processes is one indicator that a company ought to consider business modeler software.
Another indicator that business modeler software could be helpful is a periodic or frequent need to redo front office tasks because managers and employees were trained incorrectly or because there is no established, effective procedure for taking care of business tasks.
If, in the course of conducting business, the following questions are asked with any degree of regularity, business modeler software may be required in order to facilitate leaner operations:
* How do we do this?
* Why do we do it this way?
* Isn't there a better way?
How does business modeling help?
The genius of business modeler software is that it helps to reduce waste throughout your organization in a number of ways. First of all, it standardizes processes and then documents them. The business model then describes how you do things and puts that descriptive data in a common repository. Whether you are filling in for an associate who is away and have to learn a new functional area of the company or are training a new hire, your process information is standardized, accessible, and packaged for easy learning.
Business modeler software also facilitates process change management and improvement because it contains a history of how things have been done in the past and the reasons for adopting new processes over time. This history of the business models as they developed, what was done in the past and why processes were changed will help you avoid wasting time and resources by reverting to a process that you had earlier abandoned because you found them to be suboptimal.
If attempts at process change in your organization prompt comments along the lines of "we tried it that way years ago and it didn't work," business modeler software will certainly help. Only by recording and studying history can you avoid reliving it.
Another powerful aspect of business modeler software is that, if it is properly integrated with the enterprise IT environment, it is not just a training tool or a tool for senior managers; rather, it's a tool for daily use by hands-on system users. People using an enterprise software tool are using a system and therefore need a systematic approach for doing things on that computer system. The model would likely be most useful in the longer term for those who use a system only periodically, and, therefore, do not have the opportunity to rapidly master the system. Ideally, the model is not just for training, but for actual use until the processes contained in the model become second nature. Over time, the model is used less and less to guide workers as they follow processes on a daily basis. This means that when it is part and parcel of the overall enterprise software environment, business modeler software can guide front-office processes ranging from scheduling, materials planning, finance, quality, customer service, and other disciplines in a manner similar to visual cues and other methods used on the shop floor.
Business modeler software can streamline processes wherever there are a number of things to attend to; and by doing them in the proper way in the proper order, workers can reduce non-value-added steps. The fact that these processes are well-documented and centrally archived means that even after processes are learned thoroughly and the model is no longer being used as a daily guide, users can refer to it occasionally as a way to re-orient themselves on key processes.
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