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A manufacturer’s billing services department handled disputes arising from complex contracts involving the manufacturer, distributors, and customers. Terms and conditions could differ with different versions of contracts, for different years, various locations, and different phases of projects. Untangling distributors’ claims was often a lengthy, detailed, and complex matter.

Billing representatives were in the middle between sales administra- tion, which was responsible for the contracts, and the distributors. The four billing reps had been in their jobs for several years. They found their work challenging and, when they succeeded in resolving the dis- putes, satisfying. The reps regularly experienced frustration from being interrupted in the midst of researching and working through these complex business problems. The primary source of the interruptions? Phone calls from customers, distributors, and the sales administration department.

The phone system was set up so that incoming calls would trunk to a free line among the four reps and their department manager.

When all lines were busy, calls went to a department voice mailbox. Voice messages often languished for a day or more before someone got around to listening to them, leaving a message for the rep on the case. Reps typically waited to return calls until they resolved the ele- ment they were working on. On any open dispute, sales administra- tors and distributors might, and often did, complain to the director about the unresponsiveness of the billing services group. The director interrupted the manager to get on the complaint. She then interrupted the work of the rep involved. Discussions with IT about doing some- thing different with the phone system had gone nowhere. The director felt she was at a dead end.

The director had been exposed to Lean manufacturing in an MBA class she was taking. She was interested, and got in touch with the internal enterprise Lean team. A Lean team member met with her and asked about the director’s work problems. The director mentioned the area’s frustrations with the endless interruptions, and their reputation for unresponsiveness.

The Leanster walked the director through the logic of timed release of work, where specific tasks are scheduled to be performed at specific times to maintain flow and meet planned capacity. When she asked the director how that might apply to her problem, a light went on for the director. The following week she calculated the daily average number of incoming calls, and the duration of a typical reply. That allowed her to calculate total time to return a typical day’s calls. Dividing total time by the four reps plus the manager came to about 30 minutes per per- son. She figured if all the incoming calls trunked to the voice mailbox with a message promising a callback within an hour, it could work with each rep and the manager returning calls for 15 minutes twice a day. One of the five would handle all the voice messages on the hour, rotating every hour among the staff once or twice during their eight- hour day.

The director discussed this approach with the manager and reps. They agreed to try it for a week, and found that it worked. Callers were pleasantly surprised with the new responsiveness. Reps now rarely dealt with callers who were angry and frustrated about long response times. The reps could maintain the concentrated focus they needed to sort through the disputes.

Just as in manufacturing, visuals in enterprise business processes allow you to identify and respond to variations in process performance. Misses in enterprise processes can become the basis of a task on an

accountability board, are often documented on a Pareto chart at the end of a week, are frequently the subject of root cause analysis, and might appear as the problem statement in an A3 project to implement a root cause solu- tion. Leader standard work sustains the building block elements of the Lean management system by focusing on executing the visuals, the account- ability processes, and the other elements of Lean management. But the units of work in office processes can vary from unit to unit (for example, difficult versus routine requests for post-sales service, or first-time designs versus minor modification). Because business process work often lacks

The Leanster then suggested using a visual control for number of dispute cases in queue, average time to resolve them, and an account- ability board for assignments to eliminate or minimize problems that delayed resolution. A brief daily stand-up meeting reviewing the visuals and assignments sustained the gains from paced release of work, and stimulated further improvement in the area.

Engineering to Order –Mfg and Mkt DB Project Board 9am Daily Standup Proj #, owner

# lines

Dwell time Date 1 day 1 day ½ day ½ day ½ day 1 day

Order

entered Engedit Need toclarify? designEng databaseMfg databaseMkting Effectivelyapplied Releaseto mfg Reason for early, overdue

1/15 _1/15 1/15 _1/151/16 _1/161/17 _1/17 1/19 _1/221/22 _1/22 1/221/23 1/23 1/231/23 1/23 1/231/24 1/24 1/241/24 1/241/24 1/24 1/241/24

1/221/22 Pricing error found for expeditedelivery

Expedite price DB rebuild now fixed

Close to previous design

Reason overdue: complete when occurs In Out Late 1/24 1/241/24 1/25 1/251/26 1/26 1/18 1/181/19 1/26 1/26 1/261/29 1/271/27 1/271/28 1/301/30 1/19 1/23 T6F68 Pam 3 T6L88 Tom 1 T6A96 Phan 1 Legend T6F31 Rez 2

the repetitive tasks of some manufacturing settings, the percentage of a leader’s time occupied by his or her standardized work may be less than that of his or her counterparts in the factory.