LEAN e-Procurement

These days, many organizations have some sort of operational excellence, Business Improvement Group, or far-reaching cost reduction measure in the plans or underway. Many of these are Six Sigma, LEAN, or LEAN Six Sigma in nature. Some are new, some are "revivals," but in all cases they share these characteristics:

• Allocated the best and brightest in the company
• Championed by Management like never before
• Chartered with looking beyond the floor and into the office, the field, the entire Ecosystem
• Told to succeed without any new CapEx

Corporate Kiosk is highly relevant to LEAN Teams because it automates manual processes and eliminates waste at multiple points in the requisition-to-reconciliation process, including compliance, approval, configuration, inventory optimization and mistake proofing. In a broad sense, waste can be considered as any activity or resource in an organization that does not add value to an external customer. The seven wastes (see table below) can be applied to a warehousing situation, an office (substituting documents for products), transactional or support service activities, and many other work functions that are not necessarily manufacturing or operational in nature. And because Corporate Kiosk  technology can be deployed ecosystem-wide, LEAN Teams can proceed confidently, knowing that the solution will not solve one problem while creating others.