The Complete Lean Enterprise: Value Stream Mapping for Administrative and Office Processes

"Winner of the 2005 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research"

Most lean initiatives conducted by manufacturers are focused mostly on shop-floor activities — mapping the value stream of raw material to the shop-floor customer. Much of the untapped potential for productivity improvements lies, however, in non-production areas — where the value stream is administrative (i.e., "order to cash"). These "office" value streams directly support the daily production needs of an enterprise.

Beau Keyte and Drew Locher's new book, The Complete Lean Enterprise: Value Stream Mapping for Administrative and Office Processes, offers a step-by-step approach to applying lean initiatives to the administrative and office environment. It's a must read for leaders looking to improve their production support activities within their order-to-cash value stream. The Complete Lean Enterprise is a valuable tool in applying value stream mapping (VSM) to non-production areas, identifying office wastes, establishing performance metrics, speeding up administrative workflow, and improving office efficiency.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Lean Administration, 2007-08-31
This is an excellent resource for office staff wanting to value stream map their work. Its written in a clear no nonsense style with ideas you can put into practice immediately.

I like the insider 'Lean Note' every so often providing hits and ideas you would only get from an experienced lean leader, these tips are designed to stop you going down a blind ally.

If you are thinking of running a Kaizen event in your administrative area you would benefit from everyone on your team having this resource to hand.

The approach is particularly useful for manufacturing companies who have already gone lean on the production floor and are waiting for their office support and administration functions to catch up.

Highly recommended..


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Good introduction to VSM for office operation, 2007-03-10
The value of this book depends strongly on your personal knowledge about VSM and JIT/Lean. I was more used to the approach from Quick-Response-Manufacturing as Tagging&Process Mapping. Anyway, for people searching an introduction to Value-Stream-Mapping and especially the office part, I can recommend this book - the production part of the good example used, is not discussed in details - but this is not the goal of the book anyway. I read many different books to get started with VSM, but this one is one of the simpliest and most consistent books about VSM for office operation. The writters refer to one single example of a company and develop the case in a understandable manner.

Readers interested in VSM for the shoopfloor should read this book as well. As a matter, it is unfortunatelly true, that companies focus there attention to the shopfloor operations, meanwhile the potential of upstream and non-production processes are ignored. This book gives you a good knowledge, how to start your journey.

I bought both books, Complete-Lean-Enterprise (the one I refer to here) as well as Value-Stream-Management-for-the-Lean-Office. Meanwhile the first one gave me a much better overview how to practice VSM, the second one was quite week (bad case example in my oppinion) and I could not get the point how to proceed with the VSM-technique. On the other side, the later book provides more information about important issues as pitch, heijunka, work balancing etc., but already using VSM for the shopfloor and having knowledge about JIT/Lean, this will not provide new insights to you anyway. Conclusion, I would recommend this book here to get started and definetly not the book Value-Stream-Mgmnt.-for-the-Lean-office!

Best Regards,
Oliver



12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

Process mapping with a new label, 2006-11-11
I always look for new ideas and this book was weak. The material seemed to be a rehash of process mapping and not an adaptation of value stream mapping to administrative areas.

I already know how to process map and I know how to value stream map.

I agree that administrative areas are more about process mapping, but based upon the title of the book, I wanted some ideas on what others are doing to merge the two concepts.


1 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

Office Value Stream Maps, 2006-03-09
Best reference and how to on adminstrative functions for value sream mapping.


15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

A LOGICAL EXTENSION OF LEAN PRINCIPLES, 2005-09-30
This book is a good tutorial to apply Lean to an office setting, but a basic understanding of the Lean principles is required to take full advantage of the work as many parallels are drawn between manufacturing applications and their office counterparts. Overall very useful, but especially in a manufacturing/production-support office environment more than in a traditional service or other type of office setting.

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