8
Management Services Spring 2012
York. Real estate prices being what they are in the country’s most expensive city, her offi ce is only slightly bigger than a broom closet.
Information 5S A
By Dan Markovitz. llison is an
anaesthesiologist at a major hospital in New
Every horizontal surface of Allison’s offi ce (except for her chair) is covered – no, buried – in paper: printed-out emails, regular mail, departmental memos, receipts from the last conference she attended, a decade’s worth of professional journals...well, you get the idea. The place is a monument to the paper products industry. Now, given that Allison does her clinical work in the operating room and doesn’t see patients in her offi ce, you might think that the mess is without consequence. After all, it only affects her, not the surgeons or the patients. Moreover, it only interferes with the administrative aspects of her job, not critical patient care issues. But you’d be wrong. Allison’s hospital is also a teaching hospital, which means that she’s expected to write grants to bring in funds for academic research and she’s supposed to publish her fi ndings. Want to guess how many
papers Allison has published in the past two years? Zero. She justifi es her lack of academic productivity by explaining that her clinical responsibilities are so onerous that she has no time to fi nd available grants and apply for them. To be fair, she does work a long day and she doesn’t get as much academic time as she’d like. But when you watch her for a while, you see that’s not the whole story.
Paper shuffl ing It turns out that on days Allison works in her offi ce, she’s awfully busy. She spends time moving paper from the left side of the desk to the right side. She spends time looking for articles and print-outs. She spends time looking for basic offi ce supplies. She spends time searching for and printing out journal articles that she’s already printed out – two or three times before. She even spends time feeling bad about herself, embarrassed by her offi ce’s appearance and struggling to focus on her projects for the day. Allison isn’t alone, even if her story is dramatic. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that Chevron was investing tens of millions
Effi ciency
of dollars in an IT system upgrade because employees were spending between one- and-a-half to three days per month just searching for the information they needed to do their jobs1
. Studies by the
Delphi Group and the Butler Group found that employees spend one quarter of their time looking for information and estimated that searching accounted for 10% of labour costs. Independent internal studies at Intel and Cisco found that their employees spend one day per week searching for information2
.
Taiichi Ohno, the father of lean production at Toyota, is famous for his ‘seven wastes’3 and although he never talked about the waste of ‘looking for’, surely he would see that as one of the causes of unnecessary waiting which is one of the seven wastes. Certainly, he would classify the shuffl ing of piles of paper and the continual sorting and re-sorting of email by sender/ date/attachment as wasted motion.
Effect of chaos
In a manufacturing setting with a conveyer belt, the cost of these wastes is generally more obvious: workers struggle to find the right
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