How many desks does a purchase request cross before it reaches a supplier? The production manager fills out the form, accounting approves it, the general manager signs off, then it loops back to accounting. The same data gets entered into a computer three separate times by three different people, the document sits on someone’s desk for two days, and eventually a fax goes out. The process works — technically — but it carries a significant load of waste. The approach that combines lean thinking with BPM asks not whether a process functions, but how efficiently it functions.
Lean thinking defines waste as any activity that does not add value for the customer. Developed on factory floors, this principle applies just as directly to administrative and office processes. BPM — business process management — provides the method to make that waste visible: process mapping. When the two approaches work together, managers can clearly see where flow stops, which steps genuinely create value, and which steps exist simply because ‘that’s how it’s always been done.’
In office environments, lean thinking identifies three types of waste that appear most frequently. The first is waiting waste: a document or piece of information sits idle while it waits for someone to become available to act on it. The second is over-processing waste: controls, approvals, or data entries that neither the customer nor the next process step actually requires. The third is rework waste: incomplete or incorrect information causes the process to loop back, and the same work gets done twice. In an SME, all three types can exist within a single process and go unnoticed for years.
Process mapping is the essential tool for surfacing these problems. A current-state map — commonly called an ‘as-is’ map — makes every step, every decision point, and every waiting period visible. This can be done on paper; specialized software tools exist for larger organizations, but for an SME, a flow diagram drawn on a large sheet of paper is a perfectly adequate starting point. The critical discipline is to map how the process actually works, not how it is supposed to work. When this map is complete, process owners are often unable to explain why certain steps exist at all.
Once the map is in place, each step gets evaluated against a straightforward question: does this step directly add value for the customer? If the answer is no, a second question follows: is this step a legal requirement, or technically unavoidable for the process to function? Any step that receives a ‘no’ to both questions is a candidate for elimination or fundamental simplification. In practice, managers who work through this analysis find that a substantial share of process steps fall into this category. In an order approval workflow at a manufacturing company, for instance, it is not uncommon to discover that the same data is being entered manually into different forms three times over — a source of both lost time and errors.
Rework waste deserves particular attention because it tends to be invisible. The process looks clean on paper, but in reality a portion of work regularly bounces back, gets redone, and is never formally recorded. The way to detect this is through direct conversations with the people who perform the work: asking ‘when does this step go wrong, and what do you do?’ These conversations typically surface informal workarounds — patches that never appear in the official process description but have become an indispensable part of daily practice.
When an SME manager decides to apply this approach, starting with a single, concrete process is strongly advisable: a purchase request, a customer complaint workflow, or an invoice approval cycle. Launching a company-wide improvement initiative from the outset tends to stall; mapping one process, identifying its waste, and generating a visible result builds the confidence and buy-in needed to extend the method further. Once a lean BPM exercise delivers a tangible improvement, both managers and staff become willing to apply the same lens to other workflows. The power of combining lean thinking with BPM does not come from expensive software — it comes from the habit of questioning how existing processes actually work.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 12, 2008 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.