One of the biggest sources of waste in your business isn’t on the shop floor. It’s in your office.
On the factory floor, waste is easy to see. You see the pile of stock, the queue, and the machine that’s stopped.
In the office, most waste is digital. It hides in your inboxes, your spreadsheets, and your shared drives. You can’t eliminate what you can’t see, so nobody fixes it.
This video gives you eight signposts that make office waste visible. It also gives you the 8 Ates, eight actions that each end in “ate,” to reduce or remove that waste. You can apply the method to any office task today.
At a glance
The 8 wastes in the office:
- Copying and pasting data
- Spreadsheets
- Paper
- Report overproduction
- Endless meetings
- Batching
- Excess clicks
- Overreliance on one person
The 8 ‘-ates’ to eliminate them:
- Eliminate
- Accelerate
- Demonstrate
- Template
- Integrate
- Automate
- Delegate
- Orchestrate
What good looks like in the office
Start with the goal. You want information to flow freely, like a river, from a single source of truth.
Waste is anything that blocks that river or muddies that truth.
- Flow means information moves without someone pushing it along by hand
- A single source of truth means everyone works from the same data
- Anything that breaks either one is waste
The 8 wastes in the office
These eight signposts show up in almost every office.
1. Copying and pasting data
This is double handling. Someone takes data out of one system and keys it into another because the systems don’t talk. Every copy and paste is waste and a mistake waiting to happen.
2. Spreadsheets
A spreadsheet usually exists as a workaround. It’s a siloed piece of rogue information and a sign that something is missing from your core systems.
3. Paper
The moment you print it, it goes rogue. Someone writes on it or highlights it, and that information now belongs to one person only.
4. Report overproduction
Before you build any report, ask one question. What action will this information actually drive? If nobody will act on it, the report is waste.
5. Endless meetings
Constant meetings usually mean you have no good asynchronous system. If the only way to share information is to get everyone in a room, you’ll spend your life in meetings.
6. Batching
“We do all the invoices on Friday” feels efficient. It delays everything and hides problems. Batching also stretches lead times, and longer lead times mean a longer time to cash.
7. Excess clicks
Clicking 16 times for a repeat task, or flicking through 12 screens to do something simple, is waste. Every unnecessary click is friction built into your process.
8. Overreliance on one person
When only one person can do a task, the office stops if they’re not around. That’s a bottleneck. It’s not a people problem. It’s a system problem.
The 8 ‘-stes’: eight actions to eliminate office waste
Run any task through these eight actions in order. You’ll find a practical way to reduce or eliminate the waste every time.1. Eliminate
This is the first and best option. Ask whether the task adds value at all. Does this approval, email, or phone call need to happen? The cheapest task in the world is the one you delete.
2. Accelerate
If you can’t eliminate it, speed it up. Can you make it better, faster, or simpler? Could a tool, or even AI, make it easier?
3. Demonstrate
Capture the method as an SOP. In the office, an SOP is a guide, not gospel. It’s the direct fix for overreliance on one person.
- Documenting the process builds redundancy
- It helps you multi-skill your team
- You’re never one sick day away from the work stopping
The GembaDocs Chrome extension lets you record your screen and automatically turns the recording into a step-by-step SOP. It’s the easiest way to capture an office process and make it simple for the next person to follow.
4. Template
Stop everyone writing from scratch. Use email templates and templates in your CRM. When everyone replies to a quote with the same template, nobody reinvents the wheel and the standard is built into the process.
5. Integrate
Connect your systems so you have one source of truth and data flows without anyone touching it.
- Most modern software has an API, the doorway that lets two systems talk to each other
- Ask AI to read your system’s API documentation and help you connect it to the next one
- You don’t need to be a developer. You need to ask the right questions.
6. Automate
If X happens in one system, make Y happen in another. The step runs itself, and it mistake-proofs the process because a system doesn’t forget or get tired.
7. Delegate
This is the newest action. Ask whether an AI agent could handle the task end to end.
8. Orchestrate
Put your data in an asynchronous source everyone can access at any time without asking questions. That could be your ERP, your CRM, or a task management system like Monday.com.
Think of it as a visual management board on the shop floor. You walk up to the board and understand what’s happening at a glance, with no questions and no meeting.
Where to start today
You now have eight signposts to watch for, a digital Gemba walk to find them, and the 8 Ates to remove them in the right order.
- Pick one office task your team does every week
- Walk it at the screen with the person who does it
- Run it through the 8 Ates, starting with Eliminate
Make your people’s processes visible. If your team works digitally, try the GembaDocs Chrome extension to turn a screen recording into a step-by-step SOP. If you have physical processes on the floor, the GembaDocs mobile app is the fastest way to document them.