There were a few side notes that I wanted to make about this process. Culture plays a big role when looking at trying to become lean and more paperless. People are comfortable doing things the way that they have been doing them. Electronic document management is different than being able to touch and feel hard copy documents. There are fears. Job security can be a huge road block. Another big one related to that is an embarrassment factor. “Why didn’t I think of that?” These have to be taken into account when changing how we do what we do.
The other note is to make sure that we have the process as it is now – “Current is key” – and shown as the full process on paper. It’s easy to look at small parts of a process and try to fix each small piece. But that may not fix the whole process and may end up breaking something else in the process. As Randy mentioned in our meeting today, attacking small pieces of a process is counterproductive. It leads to “Rabbit Holes”. By starting with the whole process mapped we can get to the true sources of the pain. After we have that tied down, we can condense and get lean!
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