Kaizen Shop Talk

In doing a review of The Kaizen Products Office 5S Action Pack, I came across a drawing showing an office worker checking daily, weekly and monthly tasks. This slide reminded me of how I have created a standardized schedule in my office, and got me thinking of why I do this.

As an office, service or admin worker, how many tasks do you have in a day? In a week? In a month? How about in a Year? A lot of us fill numerous different roles in our office, creating a lot of tasks that are range from daily to yearly to one time tasks.

Standardizing a schedule can seem like a minor effort to us, but it can have a major impact on our productivity. We may even think that we already have a standardized schedule, but how self disciplined are we to follow it. The challenge, make it visible. How well we follow a standard schedule becomes quite clear when it is physically posted and followed.

Some tasks are minimal in importance, but some can cost the company a lot in time or money if forgotten. Office functions, such as Accounting and HR have a lot of tasks that fall into this second statement. If you make these tasks visible, and check them off as they are complete you have less chance of missing these tasks. Warning though, if they are missed you are not the only one who can see the error.

Try this:
-If you have not already, take your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks, no matter how small and put them into a calendar. (Hint: If using MS Outlook or ACT!! you can set reoccurring schedules and reminders.)
-Print this schedule on a weekly basis. Don’t forget to make this changing of schedules each week a task.
-Post it close to your desk where you can see it and cross tasks out as you go.
-Let your boss and peers know what you are doing, this way they can see your schedule. This will provide them with a lot of information, for instance when a busy time is so they won’t interrupt you.
-As you get comfortable with this you can change the blocks of time you allot for each task to represent how much time it takes to do each of these tasks.

Additional Benefit: In an office where there are few office staff, or a lot of office staff we each have tasks that are ours alone. What happens when we go on vacation? Who does the tasks that we are responsible for? Do these responsibilities go undone? If there is someone else in the office that can complete these while you are away, these weekly calendars give others the ability to see what needs to be done that week that they would not normally think of doing.

Imagine saving the company costs by making sure tasks are completed and making the pile of past due tasks you have smaller when you return to work. Just don’t forget to leave someone in charge of your calendar while you are out. This is just one of the ways to get started in standardizing and self discipline in your office. See Office 5S Action Pack for more.

Every six months I do an audit on our employee’s files. A process that is fulfills legal requirements that I have as head of HR, requirements that in my mind contain a lot of waste. As a matter of fact after doing this process I grabbed my ID badge sized 5S / 7Wastes card that had all the seven wastes listed and a pad of paper - I found an example of every one of the seven wastes in my filing cabinet.

Waiting: How many people wait for me to search through and get something from my file cabinet? Most of them because my file cabinet is locked when I am not using it, because there is sensitive information sitting in my file cabinet concerning employees, legal issues, accounting and customer information.

Motion: Searching, need I say more, how many times do I search in the file cabinet? Almost every time I go into it, I may know exactly what drawer and the main header on the file folder, but then I have to go through folder to find the document I need.

Inventory: I have to keep a box of file folders and hanging files on hand – why? Because I have a file cabinet that requires them, I can’t just throw all the paperwork into the drawer without them.

Processing: The fact is that almost every item I have in my file cabinet is also on my computer. Why do I have two file cabinets full of paper work? First let me say that I did have four of them, so I am better than I used to be. But, the laws require us to have certain items in paper form, the world still sends paper invoices, checks, notices, etc. and the majority of us, myself included, doesn’t trust the electronic world enough to through away our file cabinets full of documentation.

Transportation: Every quarter I go through each of my file cabinets and box up all of the previous quarter paperwork and put it into archive, which happens to be downstairs on the other side of our very large building.

Defects: While doing this I found a major defect in filing systems that is most likely common among all offices. Papers get “put away” and then shuffled around, when I took all my files out there were my papers I had “put away” sitting on the bottom of my file cabinet drawer.

Overproduction: While in my file cabinet I found folders and folders of pre printed material, this pre printed material was no longer valid, it came from a process that was outdated at least six months ago. I ended up sending it to recycle, and the folders they were in to the re-use pile.

Now I am sure that if I had grabbed the 7 Wastes Quick Guide and done the stand in a circle 30/30/30 exercise on the inside I could have come up with a lot more examples of the 7 Wastes of my filing cabinet. That is if I could see the inside of my file cabinet without wasting motion.

A question was recently posted on Gemba Research’s Blog Panta Rei. “I am looking for a standard routine for cleaning up servers, especially shared diskspace.” Coincidently, my company just went through a red tagging event on our server.

It is my belief that the best way to go about this is the same way you would go about a 5S event in your storage room.

Before you do anything make sure that you “Insist on giving people training about kaizen and the 7 types of waste before doing 5S with them. If 5S doesn't make sense to them, they will oppose it.”

Then, the main difference is I don’t have a Red Tag that I attach to the items I sort out. So, create a space that you can put all of your red tagged items. My space is a folder that I named “07 Red Tagged Items”. I name this with a “0” to start so that it shows up as the first file when someone opens the share disk area.

Then, 5S:

SORT: Take a couple of hours and start going through all of your folders. Move all the unnecessary, duplicate and old files and folders to the designated place. My standard work is to put the view of the folders on Details so I can see the date the last time the file was used. Almost everything on your server should be something that is used on a regular basis, just like in your office or shop floor. If it hasn’t been used in the last 6-12 months, it is most likely not needed, or even worse, not updated.

STRAIGHTEN: Make your files visible by pulling files to higher levels and getting rid of redundant folders or unnecessary folders. The farther down you have to go to get to a file the more time and motion you are wasting while in this 5S event, and the more searching that is needed while you are working a typical day. Also the farther down they are the harder it will be to see what needs to get sorted out.

Through sorting and straightening you have most likely found things that are basically trash, empty folders or files that are duplicates or old versions. Delete what you know is useless, put the rest that seem outdated or useless in the red tagged folder.

SWEEP: You can’t really sweep, or dust something electronic, though you can clean it. Delete un-needed items, organize items you found, and finally send out a message to all who use this disk space, something like this:

Files and folders on our server older than 2006 have been red tagged. (Look for '07 Red Tagged Folder')
Please move these files to a RED TAG HOLD folder if you want them saved.
All tagged items not saved will be moved to offsite place on September 10, 2007.
Please confirm that you have read this message.

STANDARDIZE: Go back and make some rules on your server. You may be able to make it so people can’t create folders inside folders – keeping the areas that are harder to see down to a minimum.

SELF-DISCIPLINE: Creating standard work for this is probably the best way to make sure that you spend as little time as possible. The fact is you will have to do this more than once. I try to do it at least once a year. I set myself reminders to do so. As you do this you will find ways that will help you better sustain the improvement. The first time is always the hardest, but as you continue to do this process you lead by example and people will start to follow.