How to develop standardized work for business processes in the transactional office environment

Abstract

Standardised Work (STW) is one of the most effective but least utilized Lean tools for business process improvement initiatives in the transactional office environment known as the ‘Lean office’. The STW not only establishes a baseline for continuous improvement initiatives but also facilitates them by giving indications of key improvement opportunities in the present best practice. The STW is a thorough document in which the process workflow is broken into a number of consecutive work elements whose processing times are labelled according to their nature and required resources. Developing the STW for business processes in the manufacturing environment is quite common; however, it is quite rare and limited in the transactional office environment. This is primarily caused by the business-office processes’ complexity or underestimating their influence on overall business success. In this study, we position and highlight the importance of the STW in the Lean office programme and propose a pragmatic and tractable framework for developing the STW for business-office processes through the use of a pilot process. The proposed STW framework was implemented successfully in the pharma industry. Finally, the paper is concluded by discussing the possible obstacles and providing future research directions.