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The Lean office: applying Lean principles with Macola®

Adapted from the Leahy Consulting paper "Introducing the Lean Office — increase your profits by reducing waste and streamlining your workflow using Macola® to apply Lean principles to your office processes", updated August 2024. First presented by Mike Leahy at the 2016 Macola® Evolve User Conference.

Lean principles are well known in manufacturing for their part in boosting profits and eliminating waste. Some people just call them best practices. The same principles apply to the office, and Macola® is the tool you already have for extending them there.

Lean is a way of thinking and acting. The goal is to create more value for customers while using fewer resources. The list below was built from consulting work with Macola® customers over the past 35 years.

Getting started

  • Top management sets the example by emphasizing sound systems and accurate data.
  • Mid-level managers document exactly how office work is to be processed.
  • Assign individuals to take ownership of the accuracy of each master file — the inventory file, for one.
  • Set a goal of 99% accurate on-hand inventory quantities.

Establish your foundation

  • Develop standardized, documented procedures for all Macola® inputs. For example:
    • Document how to key in new inventory items, customers, vendors and routings.
    • Document how dates are to be used when keying customer, purchase and production orders — which date determines when the order has to ship? See What each date field on an order means.
  • Use the Customer Price Code file to maintain accurate customer selling prices.
  • Use the Purchasing Item/Vendor file to maintain accurate buying prices and contracts.
  • Maintain accurate inventory min/max levels, primary vendor and vendor lead times.
  • Limit product categories and material cost types to a number you can actually analyze — fewer than ten of each.
  • Establish a retention policy for each of your critical transaction files.

Continuously improve these activities

  • Make sure users are trained to follow your office workflow.
  • Keep the Macola® SQL database fine-tuned to avoid slowness and downtime.
  • Monitor past-due customer, purchase and production orders.
  • Immediately close out fully received purchase orders and completed production orders.
  • Run the reset allocations and reset on-order quantities programs at least monthly.
  • Perform regular cycle counting to maintain accurate on-hand quantities.
  • Eliminate paper by emailing customer invoices and purchase orders.
  • Purge or archive old and unneeded data each month.

Macola® settings that prevent mistakes

Several of the settings below stop an error being possible rather than catching it afterwards, which is the cheaper half of Lean.

  • Tightly control the System Period calendar so invalid transaction dates cannot be keyed.
  • Turn on Lock Protected Fields in Inventory Management, so nobody can type over a unit cost or an on-hand quantity.
  • Use the A/P auto-distribution function for charging an invoice to multiple accounts.
  • Enable the Bill of Material engineering change notice feature.
  • Use the O/E Price Code file to maintain selling prices for customers.
  • Use the P/O Item/Vendor file to enforce contract buying and track vendor lead times.
  • Maintain accurate inventory reorder levels, order-up-to levels, primary vendor and vendor lead times.
  • Print barcodes on forms and product cartons.
  • Turn off multiple cash and discount accounts in package settings if you do not use them.
  • Turn on the audit trail function in each module.
  • For specialty items, use O/E to P/O integration to generate the purchase order automatically.
  • Use Event Manager to email order acknowledgements and purchase orders automatically.

What to measure

Waste in the office is invisible until something counts it. These are the measures the list above is aiming at:

  • Order-to-ship days, by product line
  • On-time shipping against the promised date
  • On-hand inventory accuracy, from cycle counting
  • On-order quantity accuracy, after resetting allocations and on-order quantities
  • Past-due customer, purchase and production orders

We have been helping Macola® users implement Lean initiatives for 25 years. If you have questions or would like assistance with any of the above, contact Mike Leahy at [email protected] or (513) 723-8090.

Support & contact

Our team is glad to help with anything from a quick question to a full implementation.