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Chapter 3
Flow
All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the
moment the customer gives us an order to the point
when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the
time line by reducing the non-value adding wastes.
—Taiichi Ohno
Consider some of these typical wastes in a service environment:
◾ The time wasted in trying to get back to work after an
interruption. That’s the time you spend rereading the
previous two pages of a document to get back to where
you were … before your coworker asked you for advice.
It’s the time you spend retracing the formulas you were
debugging in a spreadsheet model … until you replied
to an e-mail. It’s th