The lean philosophy aims to minimize waste, especially in the production process, reducing activities that do not add value to the final product, increasing quality, reducing time and costs. This philosophy has been applied outside the construction site, such as administrative sectors of companies, known as Lean Office. This philosophy tries to adapt to offices the Lean Production principles: reduce waste in activities that do not add value from a customer point of view. This paper presents an application of the lean concepts to offices in the buying and suppliers’ payment processes, which involves both the construction site and financial department of a construction company in the city of Fortaleza (Brazil). The choice of studying the flow of payments process was due to the identification of flaws such as: lack of standardization, failure to meet deadlines and excessive rework, which resulted in waste of resources. The method includes: literature review on the lean office concepts, mapping activities of the process chosen to be studied, interviews with employees involved in the process, defining individual activities and designing the current value stream. From that, a future value stream map was suggested and applied, which resulted in elimination of waste, improving quality and meeting deadlines, generating a 25% reduction on process cycle time. The Lean Office implementation has improved productivity considerably, added value to tasks and eliminated waste.
Lean office, value stream map, waste, lean construction.
Costa, H. M. , Silva, M. V. V. , Mourão, A. , Valente, C. P. & Laércio, F. 2013. Redesigning Administrative Procedures Using Value Stream Mapping a Case Study, 21th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , 1049-1056. doi.org/ a >
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