Improving processes in a postgraduate office of a university through lean office tools

Abstract

This paper reports the administrative processes improvement based on Lean Office tools in an office environment of a University department. Lean tools such as electronic standardization were applied on the six educational projects of the department. Also, some were used to organize the computer desktop and network drives to improve the supporting educational projects information. Additionally, due to the absence of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), some were defined and implemented on the department. The main results were the electronic standardization successful implementation, reorganization of the drives and the desktop. The impacts were a reduction of 84% on the files search time, improvements on the development of forms for student registration and projects managing, a 69% reduction of time searching for student information or data, a reduction of the input times and information handling in an estimated total of 12 hours/year, identification of KPI and development of a dashboard for visual analysis and monitoring of these.