Lean Office

Value Streams – the PQPR Table
In transactional applications some of the difficult questions to answer generally are:

  • Where do we focus?
  • Where are the biggest training errors?
  • Lean can’t work here – we are ‘knowledge workers’ and our work changes every day

“What we do” generally is a difficult question to answer, along with those above;  However,after a PQPR table is built we can determine what value stream (listed here as ‘family’) to focus on by looking at:

  1. Overall volume
  2. Lead time & delays
  3. Errors

The rows of data are the types of work that your team works on.  These may be listed as ‘transaction codes’ in your system or even form names.  But these are the ‘transaction type’ or as defined by the PQPR method – the “product.”  PQPR stands for ‘product quantity, product routing’ and is an indispensable asset used here.

The columns are the ‘functions’ or different people that these transactions pass through.  Here this table has been sorted to group the families, or value streams, and with this data our team is ready to go.  If you were armed with this table, where would you focus?  Why?
Tremendous Waste
Some people, quite frankly, don’t believe us.  85% process waste in my process?  But when you really drill down and analyze the activities in your process they fail the following VA (value add) litmus test.

  1. Will the customer pay for this activity?
  2. Is this activity done for the first time?
  3. Does this activity transform our good or service?

With these as guiding principles you’ll begin to see the tremendous opportunities in your process using Morae and our approach to Lean in transactional which we simply call the LeanPC methodology.  Learn more by contacting us today.