The average employee spends 400 hours per year looking for the information to do their jobs.
Gartner Research
Implementing Lean is difficult and those responsible have little time to waste searching for the information they need. Yet as your team works diligently to get the job done, they will undoubtedly create a lot of documents and files along the way. Eventually the vast number of documents created starts to become difficult to manage. At that point, statements like the following become more commonplace:
“I had a half hour at the end of the day to work on my project. I spent the entire time trying to find the spreadsheet we were using! How am I supposed to get all of this done if I can’t even find what I need?”
How can Lean Project Manager Software keep this situation from slowing your Lean implementation down?
Here is how your team uses Lean Project Manager Software to prevent tremendous amounts of waste:
- You create a separate electronic space for information related to your Lean initiative.
- Your team lists your Lean activities by creating an understandable Project Name for each of your activities, for example: Press 12 TPM The activities (projects) appear on the main list of projects. You can then click through any project name to access the project summary/update page for each project.
- When you name a new project, the software automatically creates a named Project Folder and puts a link on the project summary/update page where it can be shared by everyone immediately.
- Your team then stores working documents for each project in each project folder.
- To get to back to a project folder, just find the Project Name using the intuitive dropdown lists that help you sort projects by department, value stream, strategy, metric or by the project owners name. Next click through the project name, then through the project folder link to find what you need. The process takes only seconds.
- When a project has been closed, leave all of the documents in the folder, or, if your organization requires final documents to be stored on a network drive, copy and store your final documents to the designated folder on your network.
- If you need to get to the folder again after the project has been closed, the fastest way is to use use the LPM software filters to find the project and the folder, or you can use LPM Software search functionality.
Few things are more stressful than having trouble finding what you need when time is short. Using Lean Project Manager Software can save your implementation team hundreds of hours of "time spent searching" waste and prevent them from experiencing the aggravation that goes hand-in-hand with not being able to find what they need quickly. How much faster could your team move if they were organized in this way? How much would their motivation improve? Would the right tool help drive your Lean program forward to deliver better, faster results?
