Investigations have shown that a huge amount of manpower is being wasted on corporate administration
At first glance, everything looks great. After lean production, German companies are now turning their attention to optimizing administrative processes too. The Stuttgart-based Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) estimates that administration productivity will increase by 18% over the next three years.
However, this increase in efficiency could reach up to 30% if lean management were to be implemented consistently. Unfortunately, as shown in a study by IPA and the Bad Homburg-based Kaizen Institute of 170 German companies of all sizes and in all major sectors, around a third of working hours are wasted by inefficient worksteps in the administration department of German companies.
Unnecessary corrections and queries, duplicated processes, waiting times for urgent return calls or reports, unpunctual starts to meetings or over-long discussions all take up valuable manpower.
And it is client orientation that suffers most from this waste. In the majority of companies, three or more organizational units are involved in processing an order. Time is lost at the interfaces between the departments. Throughput times fluctuate wildly, the company's deliveries are unreliable.
To make matters worse, many of those responsible for the problems don't know where they are making errors and how to rectify them. They are often incapable of making statements about processing and throughput times in their administration departments.
In two-thirds of the companies, more than 5% of all organizational processes result in queries – and thus need subsequent revision. In automated lean production, the maximum tolerance is 0.01%. The main cause of waste is inefficient EDP work, which is not integrated consistently into workflows.
Although the technical prerequisites for improvement are all there, in the end, it is inefficiency that triumphs.
hspag.com