Office Work Flow (#72)
/In this podcast episode, we talk about ways in which the flow of work within an accounting department can be improved. Key points made are noted below.
The accounting department handles a lot of transactions, and that means there’s a lot of paper flow, and also a lot of physical movement within the department. The trick is to handle those transactions as efficiently as possible, and a good way to look at it is office work flow.
Remove Obstacles
The first step is to take out of the department anything that gets in the way. This means removing excess chairs, desks, and filing cabinets, as well as unused computers, printers, fax machines, and so on. Once those items are gone, make a layout chart for the entire department. On the chart, list all furniture, offices, and cubicles, and then add to it the flow of travel that everyone takes over the course of the day.
Minimize Travel
What you’ll usually see is that there’s a lot of unnecessary travel. For example, a manager buys a really large copier with all kinds of functions, and puts it in a special copy room way down at the end of the hall. If you have that situation, then there’ll be plenty of wasted travel down the hall.
Same thing goes for mail. If a billings clerk is creating customer invoices off and on through the day, she might wander down the hall seven or eight times to drop off envelopes at the front desk. You get the idea.
The solutions are pretty obvious. Instead of a central printer or copier, buy a bunch of small ones, so that people just turn around in their work areas, and there it is. No need to travel anywhere. This is really a good way to go with printers, because a decent laser printer just doesn’t cost that much anymore. As for fax machines, I’m not entirely sure they’re even needed, since you can easily give everyone a decent high-speed scanner, and have them scan documents and then e-mail them.
As for travel to the mailbox, just create a mail drop in the accounting department, and have someone collect it once at the end of the day.
Enhance Storage Systems
A special issue is the filing cabinet. Because of all the paperwork they contain, they’re basically immovable, or at least can’t be moved without a great deal of effort. So, everyone has to walk to the filing cabinet.
The work flows related to filing cabinets are so repetitive that you may even notice that the carpet is worn out on the travel paths between certain clerks and their favorite cabinets. So what do you do?
The trick is to have clerks move all the files they need from a filing cabinet into a wheeled bin, and bring the bin back to their work areas. The intent is to have a whole day’s work sitting next to them, so they only take one trip to the cabinet in the morning, and then one more trip to put it all back in the evening. That’s not always possible, but it might apply to a few situations.
Enhance the Cubicle Layout
And then we have the issue of cubicles. They’re pretty fixed objects. But the work flow of the accounting department can vary quite a bit over time, so you have to work around the cubicles. One option is to take them out entirely, and replace them with desks. The nice thing about a desk is that it can be moved pretty easily. You can create small work groups by assembling clusters of desks. For example, it might make sense to put the cash applications person right next to the collections person, who’s also next to the invoicing person. That way, all three people involved with customer payments can interact. This is easy with desks, a lot tougher with cubicles.
Especially cubicles with high walls, which completely eliminate communications. If you’ve got to have cubicles, then at least have ones with low walls. That way people can look across at each other much more easily.
Enhance the Cubicle Work Flow
Now there’s also work flow within a single person’s work area. In case you hadn’t noticed, there are basically two types of people – those with one piece of paper on their desks, and those who are comfortable living in a dumpster. That second group claims they’re still efficient, but I don’t buy it.
This is a really difficult area to correct. Someone who’s comfortable with clutter just doesn’t see the point in cleaning up their work areas. But if you can get through the interpersonal issues, then here’s what to do next. Empty out the work area. Completely. That means the computer, the cables, the files – everything. Dust it down. Make it quite clear that you’re taking it right down to the bare walls. Then very selectively put back only those items that are really needed. Take everything else, and put it in a holding area for a week or so, in case something else is needed. After that, stick all the residuals back in the supplies closet, or wherever it belongs.
Now, I’m not talking about just clearing out some excess files. I mean that you question why someone has an extra pen. Why they keep an extra Post-it pad. And etcetera. The reason is that clutter is incremental, and will start building again as soon as you finish this exercise. So by taking things right down to the bare minimum, there’s a larger amount of reclutterization needed to return to the bad old days.
And, by the way, this complete overhaul is not something you do just once. Certainly, try it once a year, and some companies go in for it a lot more frequently.
Now, work flow can also be impeded when you have too much material – of all kinds – hiding inside drawers, and cabinets, and behind doors. The problem is that low-usage items get parked in these places, and everyone forgets about them, and then you have a lengthy search on your hands when you finally DO need them. Instead, take doors off of cabinets and remove drawers. Better yet, eliminate entire cabinets and don’t have drawers. This forces you to keep everything out in the open, which makes you more likely to file it away where it should have been filed in the first place.
Clarify Office Supply Storage
And finally, we have office supplies. This impedes work flow when people have to search high and low for supplies. Obviously, don’t let anyone squirrel away supplies, so that no one else has any. The objection is that the supplies area is always short of supplies, so people have to keep a private stash. To get around that objection, assign supplies replenishment to one person, and make sure there’s a review checklist that they go through every single day. If you do that, supplies shouldn’t run short.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you keep printer cartridges in a central area. If there are lots of printers, then keep a few spares next to every printer, or at least in a nearby depot, so that people can swap them out on the spot.
Parting Thoughts
In short, accounting is a busy hive of – inefficiency. People move around far too much for all kinds of reasons. But if you remove impediments and cluster the right people together, the resulting efficiency improvements can be amazing.