Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques

Operational Excellence is achieved when all employees in your organization can see the flow of value to your customers and can make adjustments to that flow before it breaks down. Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques presents nine time-tested guidelines for designing business process flow that enable Operational Excellence in the office. Each chapter describes one guideline by using text, illustrations, and practical examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of why creating flow in the office is essential and how to achieve it.

Accounting for the reality that most office employees are required to work on many different projects throughout the day, this book details a step-by-step methodology for leveraging traditional value stream flow to establish Operational Excellence in an office environment. In addition, it describes a more advanced form of flow called "self-healing" flow—in which employees are capable of identifying and fixing problems with the flow without requiring management intervention.

Explaining how to achieve Operational Excellence and self-healing flow with the nine guidelines, the book also introduces new concepts such as part-time continuous flow processing cells, workflow cycles, takt capability, integration events, pitch in the office, and ways to tell whether your office is on time.

With this book, you will be able to take the knowledge provided and immediately apply it by following the step-by-step checklists included at the end of each chapter. In addition to the lists of action items for implementing each guideline, the book includes "acid tests" you can use to determine if you have implemented each guideline correctly.

When finished, you will have designed an end-to-end flow for the services in your office as well as visual systems to help employees distinguish normal flow from abnormal flow so they can fix flow problems on their own, before they negatively impact your customers.

Kevin J. Duggan has more than 30 years of experience applying advanced Lean techniques to achieve Operational Excellence. He is the author of three books on the subject: Design for Operational Excellence: A Breakthrough Strategy for Business Growth (McGraw-Hill, 2011), Creating Mixed Model Value Streams (Productivity Press, 2002), and The Office That Grows Your Business: Achieving Operational Excellence in Your Business Processes (The Institute for Operational Excellence, 2009).

A recognized authority on Operational Excellence, Duggan has contributed to publications such as Industry Week, Aviation Week, Food Engineering, Flow Control, Assembly, Lean Management Journal, and Plant Services, and has appeared on CNN and the Fox Business Network. He is a frequent keynote speaker, master of ceremonies, and panelist at both public and private conferences globally, and he also lectures graduate students in colleges throughout the United States.

In 1998, Duggan founded Duggan Associates (North Kingstown, Rhode Island), an international training and advisory firm that assists companies in applying advanced Lean techniques to their manufacturing and office operations through hands-on support and workshops. Since Duggan Associates’ inception, he has helped Fortune 50 corporations as well as small businesses with single site operations in the insurance, engineering development, financial services, aerospace, energy, and manufacturing industries.

In 2007, Duggan founded the Institute for Operational Excellence (also in North Kingstown), the leading educational center on Operational Excellence, which provides resources, such as workshops, online training, how-to articles, and books to a global community of members.