Eliminate Waste From Your Office Space

Waste is any action in a process that does not add value to the customer.

The customer will not pay for it. Most offices are wasteful, but it’s easy to fix with a little focus.

The first step is to see the waste, then eliminate it. To see it, use the acronym TIMWOODS.

1. Office Transport Waste: workers who collaborate are far apart and hard to reach.

2. Office Inventory Waste: customers waiting for service, unused records in a database, obsolete files, or files waiting to be worked on.

3. Office Motion Waste: walking, reaching for materials, looking for files, excess mouse clicks, and data double entry.

4. Office Waiting Waste: waiting for others to respond to a message, files that need to be reviewed, unproductive meetings, or a slow computer.

5. Office Overproduction Waste: making extra copies, creating useless reports no one reads (GUILTY), and over-communicating.

6. Office Over-processing Waste: generating unnecessary detailed reports, too many steps in the purchasing process, excessive signatures, double-entry of data, too many forms, or too many extra steps in a procedure.

7. Office Defects Waste: mistakes, data entry errors, wrong shipments, or anything when the…