When a company has the budget for professional consultants, they bring experience from leading hundreds of projects and training thousands of people. They know what to expect and how to avoid many common problems.

But not every company can afford outside consulting — which is why you’ve stepped up to the plate.

Mapping to See: A value-stream improvement kit for the office and service

After years of helping teams learn how to implement lean transformations in office and service processes, we’ve put together a complete facilitator’s kit with the instructions, materials, and guides you’ll need to lead your own project. It will show you the only way to make and sustain the changes you seek.

The Mapping to See kit will enable you to…

• Involve top management in scoping critical projects.
• Get clear direction for the project team.
• Plan workshops.
• Lead the team in creating a current state map, and identify waste and system problems.
• Review the basics of lean value streams with the team.
• Help the team design a future state map.
• Help the team develop an implementation plan.
• Show the team how to track and review progress on the plan.

Get the team ready to present their future state map and plan to upper management, and ask for management support.

With the Mapping to See kit, you will drive lean transformation by developing a whole company of problem solvers who can tackle the problems that keep their work from being effective, efficient and satisfying.

Mapping to See is based on our years of lean experience in manufacturing, office and service business systems. We have observed the common problems with lean initiatives, identified the reasons behind them, and found methods to avoid or reduce them.

What our work has shown us about lean office implementations

Office processes are different
Most office and service processes were never formally designed — they simply grew up. “Patches” added along the way create more waste and confusion. There are so many work-arounds that no one fully understands the process. Office and service processes tend to be low volume, not repetitive, and have high variation.

Key output requirements are not well defined. The process purpose and value are not clear. There are no effective measures for managing processes, and if there are any metrics at all, they focus on end results rather than continuous improvement.

In manufacturing, processes transform material. In the office, they transform information — invisibly. This makes lean improvements much more difficult, because processes are hard to make visual. Too often, office processes have drifted away from support of the company’s value-creation system and support functional department goals. Functions do not work together to create the flow of work necessary to effectively serve customers and make a profit. 

Failure is frequent
Companies mistakenly focus on lean tools, with limited or spotty results. While they target eliminating waste, they achieve local improvements with little impact on overall performance. Companies fail to integrate improvements across the entire system. Such lean improvements are seldom sustained. And when lean is not applied to pressing business issues, it doesn’t get management’s attention.

Improvement is never-ending
Improvement is continuous because feedback about results shows what needs to be done next. And initiatives need to be selected and prioritized as continuous improvements rather than one time interventions.

People make it happen
Too often, lean initiatives miss what Toyota has demonstrated. System-wide improvement occurs only when all employees are engaged every day in solving problems related to their work.  Improvements are not random — they are linked to operational performance and business needs. People closest to the work must be challenged and given a chance to design and test new processes. The improvement project needs to focus on helping them solve their own problems

When we meet the people involved in typical office and services processes, we see frustration, blaming, and long-held bad feelings. Worse, we see people giving up on making things better. Poorly defined systems with unclear expectations and value are beating employees’ best efforts.

Mapping to See: A value-stream improvement kit for the
office and service. Developed by Beau Keyte, Jim Luckman,
Kirk Paluska, Guy Parsons, John Shook, Tom Shuker, and
David Verble, and published by the Lean Enterprise Institute.
Includes detailed instructions, slide presentations with
optional scripts, handout masters, special tips, background
information, and the lean problem-solving guid

Mapping to See will give you everything you need to lead an office or service process improvement initiative. It will:

1. Show you how to use value stream mapping to help your team reduce process waste, shorten order-to-completion time, and improve first-time quality.
2. Guide you in leading an improvement process that can show broad sustained impact. It guides you through: -Engaging multiple levels of the organization,
   -Identifying value stream improvement projects linked to business needs,
   -Leading value stream mapping workshops to create current state maps,
   -Identifying waste and systems problems in the current state,
   -Designing an improved future state value stream, and,
   -Planning and managing implementation to assure results are achieved.
3. Guide you in teaching the team about lean, continuous improvement and solving work-related problems through hands-on simulation and working on their problem processes.
4. Enable you quickly to initiate value stream performance improvement projects that can lead to cost reductions and/or increased capability.
5. Help you teach the approach to lean and continuous improvement that has made Toyota an outstanding business performer for years, and develop others in your organization to be continuous improvement leaders.

About the Lean Transformations Group

The Lean Transformations Group consultants have implemented lean in North American, European and Pacific Rim companies. After extensive experience in manufacturing, we began use value stream mapping to make lean improvements in office and service processes. Since then, we have observed the problems with lean initiatives, identified the reasons behind them, found methods to avoid or reduce them, and engaged organizations in self-sustaining lean transformations.