My eyes!! I can’t see.

What is the difference between manufacturing and service? No, it is not a joke and no I am not talking about those “in service, value is made at the point of transaction” or “in service, the customer is part of the process” statements. All valid points, but get business people of whatever stripe in the same room and ask them that question and you will never get them to agree.

Let’s re-ask the question from the point of view of applying Lean Thinking to each. The difference between the two is that waste is much harder to see in service organisations. That is not to say that waste is always easy to see in manufacturing. But in a factory you can walk along a production line and see inventory sitting around, you can watch staff walking to and fro to get tools and parts and you can see the rework bins full of bad parts waiting to be fixed.

In the office people often sit quietly and the work in progress is in email in boxes, paper in-trays, computer systems and postal systems. How do you see the waste? With difficulty, is the answer. The only way to really see is to map the process with the people who do the work. And the trick in doing that is to get them to tell you the secret stuff they do to get the job done. The personal spreadsheet of the people to call in certain situations, the bits of paper that show the product codes that they have collected over the years to help them do their jobs. Some of these things need canning and some need bringing out to become part of the official process to assist all who do that work.

Bringing out these things is not easy in itself. You need to persuade staff that you are not out to expose their tricks to punish them for working around the system, but that you need an accurate picture of the current reality so we can all move to something better.

Involving the staff in the mapping process is essential, since if you don’t you will never expose all the waste in an office setting were it is very difficult to see waste just by walking around.