Book excerpt: Operational Excellence is achieved when all employees in your organization can see the flow of value to your customers and can make adjustments to that flow before it breaks down. Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques presents nine time-tested guidelines for designing business process flow that enable Operational Excellence in the office. Each chapter describes one guideline by using text, illustrations, and practical examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of why creating flow in the office is essential and how to achieve it. Accounting for the reality that most office employees are required to work on many different projects throughout the day, this book details a step-by-step methodology for leveraging traditional value stream flow to establish Operational Excellence in an office environment. In addition, it describes a more advanced form of flow called "self-healing" flow—in which employees are capable of identifying and fixing problems with the flow without requiring management intervention. Explaining how to achieve Operational Excellence and self-healing flow with the nine guidelines, the book also introduces new concepts such as part-time continuous flow processing cells, workflow cycles, takt capability, integration events, pitch in the office, and ways to tell whether your office is on time. With this book, you will be able to take the knowledge provided and immediately apply it by following the step-by-step checklists included at the end of each chapter. In addition to the lists of action items for implementing each guideline, the book includes "acid tests" you can use to determine if you have implemented each guideline correctly. When finished, you will have designed an end-to-end flow for the services in your office as well as visual systems to help employees distinguish normal flow from abnormal flow so they can fix flow problems on their own, before they negatively impact your customers.