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 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence

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How to develop standardized work for business

processes in the transactional office environment

Taher Ahmadi & Nooshin Rahmani

To cite this article: Taher Ahmadi & Nooshin Rahmani (2023): How to develop standardized
work for business processes in the transactional office environment, Total Quality
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Total Quality Management, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2023.2203377

How to develop standardized work for business processes in the

transactional office environment
a,b* c
Taher Ahmadi and Nooshin Rahmani
a
Marketing & Supply Chain Management Center, Nyenrode Business University, Breukelen, The
Netherlands; bDepartment of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven
University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; cOperational Excellence Department,
Schunk Xycarb Technology BV., Helmond, The Netherlands

Standardised Work (STW) is one of the most effective but least utilized Lean tools for
business process improvement initiatives in the transactional office environment known
as the ‘Lean office’. The STW not only establishes a baseline for continuous
improvement initiatives but also facilitates them by giving indications of key
improvement opportunities in the present best practice. The STW is a thorough
document in which the process workflow is broken into a number of consecutive
work elements whose processing times are labelled according to their nature and
required resources. Developing the STW for business processes in the manufacturing
environment is quite common; however, it is quite rare and limited in the
transactional office environment. This is primarily caused by the business-office
processes’ complexity or underestimating their influence on overall business success.
In this study, we position and highlight the importance of the STW in the Lean
office programme and propose a pragmatic and tractable framework for developing
the STW for business-office processes through the use of a pilot process. The
proposed STW framework was implemented successfully in the pharma industry.
Finally, the paper is concluded by discussing the possible obstacles and providing
future research directions.
Keywords: Lean office programme; business-office processes; standardised work;
Kaizen and continuous improvement; drive for excellence

1. Introduction
The global competitive marketplace has turned Lean management into one of the most
widely used business strategies from which companies can benefit to survive or thrive
(Freitas & Freitas, 2020b; Monteiro et al., 2015; Unwin, 2005). First, Lean was introduced
by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1990s as a management approach to
target a higher performance efficiency on the one hand and higher customers’ satisfaction
on the other (Womack et al. (1990) as cited in Bortolotti and Romano (2012)). To achieve
these two conflicting targets, Lean focuses on eliminating or reducing activities that need
resources and create no value for the customers known as non-value-added activities or
wastes (Hung et al., 2021; Ohno, 1988; Pavnaskar et al., 2003; Shamah, 2013). Leyer
et al. (2021) discovered that Lean can significantly improve staff satisfaction and well-
being in an organization if it is seen as a tool for improving efficiency rather than a
method of reducing the workforce.
For business processes in the manufacturing environment, seven types of wastes (i.e.
also known as Toyota’s seven wastes) such as excessive transportation, unnecessary

*Corresponding author. Email: t.ahmadi@nyenrode.nl

© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 T. Ahmadi and N. Rahmani

inventory, unnecessary motion, waiting times, overproduction, over-processing, and

defective products have been recognized (Besser Freitag et al., 2018; Freitas & Freitas,
2020a; Pereira Librelato et al., 2014; Sabur & Simatupang, 2015). These seven wastes
should be identified and eliminated using Lean tools and techniques.
In the recent century, different Lean techniques such as Gemba, Ando, Jidoka, Hei-
junka, Six Sigma, Kanban, Poka-Yoke, Takt time, Just-in-Time (JIT), Pull system, one-
piece follow, 5S, 5Whys, Fishbone diagram, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM),
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Single Minute
Exchange of Die (SMED), Business Process Mapping (BPM), Standardized Work
(STW), and so on, have been developed and implemented by practitioners in a wide
range of industries (Dennis, 2015; Fiorillo et al., 2021; Ohno, 1988). Because Lean man-
agement has its roots in the manufacturing environment, there is a wrong belief that it
could not possibly work in the office environment (Nǎftǎnǎilǎ & Mocanu, 2014; Direction,
2005). Therefore, to the best of our knowledge, some of the aforementioned Lean tech-
niques and specifically STW have not been adapted and applied to the transactional
office environment yet (Chiarini & Gabberi, 2022).
According to Dennis (2015, p. 25), STW serves as a foundation for Lean manage-
ment. The STW is a highly detailed work procedure that provides step-by-step guidelines
for performing day-to-day process activities. In other words, the STW documents the
process knowledge that has become a vital strategic resource for businesses to achieve
a competitive advantage (Hu et al., 2019). As emphasized by Emiliani (2008), if STW
is applied correctly, it provides plenty of opportunities from which businesses can
benefit vastly.
First, the STW can create a great learning platform for organizational and individual
learning (e.g. new hires) by documenting the current state of the process knowledge.
Second, it creates a baseline or a reference point for Kaizen and continuous improvement
initiatives by illustrating and comparing the current and future states of the process. Third,
it reveals abnormalities and highlights improvement opportunities by breaking down the
process into a set of sequential work elements and labelling them in terms of their type
and processing time. Fourth, it improves the quality and stability of the process outputs
by determining and indicating all the required steps for performing the process sequen-
tially. This last benefit is more emphasised when a process is performed by more than
one expert. Finally, the STW can facilitate workforce management by providing infor-
mation on the required workload in terms of the processing time of the processes
(Dennis, 2015, p. 69; Emiliani, 2008).
It is noteworthy that the STW concept is one of the most misunderstood and misapplied
Lean techniques (Liker & Meier, 2006, pp. 113–114). The first misunderstanding is mis-
taking the STW for work standards. Work standards are work procedures defined by man-
agement to ensure that each employee puts forth the necessary effort (Emiliani, 2008). In
other words, management can use the work standard to either penalize employees for non-
performance or entice them to exceed the standard. The second misunderstanding is con-
sidering STW as a never-changing and set-in-stone document. However, STW changes
when people find better ideas for performing the work or when business circumstances
change (Emiliani, 2008).
Despite the above-mentioned enormous benefits of the STW, mostly it has just been
applied to manufacturing processes. This might be either due to underestimating the impor-
tance of nonmanufacturing processes in the success of businesses since the costs associated
with business-office processes are typically not part of the direct cost of the product (Huls,
2005) or due to the complexity of the business-office processes since they have less
 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence 3

repetitiveness and different variations compared to the manufacturing processes (Chen &
Cox, 2012; Pika et al., 2016). The office functions (i.e. from product or service design to
marketing) can form 60% up to 80% of the efforts associated with delivering a product or
service to the customers (Direction, 2005). Therefore, the overall business performance
can suffer seriously when business-office processes are not efficient (Sousa & Dinis-Car-
valho, 2021).
Even though Yokoyama et al. (2019) have mentioned six references (i.e. Bodin Daniels-
son, 2013; da Silva et al., 2015; Monteiro et al., 2015; Năftănăilă & Mocanu, 2014; Nǎftǎnǎilǎ
& Mocanu, 2014; Direction, 2005) concerning STW in the office environment, none of the
mentioned references proposes how STW might be implemented in the office environment.
This study is the first study in the literature of Lean to propose a systematic approach to devel-
oping the STW in the transactional office environment and it sheds light on the application of
the STW while discussing its challenges and limitations. The remainder of this paper is organ-
ised as follows: In Section 2, the STW is positioned in the Lean office programme by discuss-
ing the most important events within the programme. Then, an STW tool named STW
combination chart is proposed based on the characteristics of the business-office processes
work in Section 3. In Section 4, the development of the STW for the business-office processes
is illustrated considering the invoice-checking process as a pilot. Afterwards, the limitations
and challenges of the STW in the transactional office environment are discussed in Section 5.
Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper by summarizing the bottom lines and key points of the
paper and proposing directions for future research.

2. Positioning the STW in the Lean office program

The Lean Office programme is an operational excellence programme that aims at applying
the principles of lean thinking in administrative areas to eliminate waste in business-office
processes and information flows (Freitas & Freitas, 2020a). Figure 1 provides a schematic
representation of the Lean office programme by analogy with a 2-pillar house. For

Figure 1. The 2-pillar Lean office house.

4 T. Ahmadi and N. Rahmani

establishing a successful Lean office programme, the two pillars of BPM and STW should
be developed consecutively as the first foundation steps.
Afterwards, these two pillars are used to facilitate the continuous improvement
initiatives known as Kaizen events. In other words, Kaizen events are planned to
shine a light on waste in the processes and empower the organizational lean culture
by training and engaging all the employees in the Kaizen events. During these Kaizen
events, different Lean tools might be used. These Lean tools and techniques have
been presented as blocks of the Lean office house in Figure 1. It is noteworthy that
during this continuous improvement journey, after each successful Kaizen event and
applying possible changes to the process, the corresponding BPM and STW documents
should be updated. In what follows, we briefly discuss the 2-pillar of the Lean office
house and Kaizen event.
Business Process Mapping (BPM). BPM is a graphical illustration that models the
relationships between the activities, people, data, and objects involved in a process to
produce a specific output (Biazzo, 2002). In a BPM event, the outline of the process is
mapped by the BPM team consisting of a developer and the person who is executing
the process (i.e. who possesses the process knowledge) known as the Subject Matter
Expert (SME). The BPM for a process can be developed by gathering high-level infor-
mation about the current state of the process and its flow through interviewing the SME
by the BPM developer. As a result, all the variations of a process known as sub-processes
are determined. Since the BPM is a high-level document and does not contain detailed
information about each segment of the process, it is hard to make a relative comparison
between what is happening and what is thought to be happening in the process. As the
next step, STW documents resolve this shortcoming of the BPM.
Standardized Work (STW). The STW is a highly detailed work procedure that provides
step-by-step guidelines for performing day-to-day process activities by documenting the
process knowledge. Similar to the BPM event, an STW team is comprised of a developer
and the SME(s). The STW for a process can be developed by gathering detailed infor-
mation about required steps in the current state of each sub-process and their sequence
through interviewing the SME(s) by the STW developer.
Kaizen. Also known as continuous improvement, can be defined as a procedure for
operational process excellence (Pereira Librelato et al., 2014). In the Lean office pro-
gramme, the STW serves as a baseline and a reference for measuring the current and
future states of the process. According to M. Chen and Lyu (2009), one of the five
phases of the DMAIC (i.e. Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control) roadmap
is ‘Measure’ which refers to measuring the current and the new state of the practice in
a continuous improvement project. This indicates that a measurable Key Performance
Indicator (KPI) for the continuous improvement project is needed; otherwise, it is
almost impossible to calculate the improvement achievement of a Kaizen event. In this
study, we consider the efficiency of the Best Practice (BP) as a KPI and we measure
it in terms of the required labour hours for completing the process (Rohleder & Silver,
1997). As it is illustrated in Figure 2, continuous improvement initiatives can be per-
formed using consecutive Kaizen events to improve the KPI of the BP. In this case,
the KPI of the BP should be measured using STW before and after each Kaizen event.
Then, by comparing the performance of the old and new BPs, the amount of improve-
ment can be calculated.
Following Figure 2, let BP[t0 , t1 ] represent the BP for the period of [t0 , t1 ]. Also, let us
assume that through a Kaizen event during this period, the BP is promoted to a new level of
BP[t1 , t2 ] for the next period of [t1 , t2 ]. Then, the improvement can be calculated in
 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence 5

Figure 2. The cycle of the STW-Kaizen in the incremental continuous improvement.

percentage as follows.


KPI value of BP[t1 , t2 ] − KPI value of BP[t0 , t1 ]
Improvement leap (%) =
KPI value of BP[t0 , t1 ]
× 100%. (1)

According to Equation (1), a bigger Improvement leap (%) shows a bigger improvement
achievement and a smaller value shows a smaller improvement achievement. As it is
shown in Figure 2, it is worth mentioning that different Kaizen events may result in different
improvements leaps (%), and from a continuous improvement perspective, the continuum of
the continuous improvement process is more important than the size of the improvement
leaps (Pereira Librelato et al., 2014). Remember that after each successful Kaizen event
and making possible changes to the process, a new version of the BPM, and STW documents
should be developed to capture the new state of the process. Also, it is noteworthy that the
latest version of these documents should always be shared on an internal network. From now
on, we restrict our focus to the STW as it is our main contribution to the Lean office.

3. An STW tool for the transactional office environment

Most of the manufacturing processes are stable and repeatable while most of the office pro-
cesses are not, thus the STW has been highly recommended for manufacturing processes
(Liker & Meier, 2006, p. 125). In this section, we introduce a suitable STW tool for non-
manufacturing processes by comparing manufacturing and non-manufacturing processes
and adapting the available manufacturing STW tool for non-manufacturing processes. It
is worth emphasizing that the intention of the STW is not prescribing how the work
should be done; however, it is a representation of what is happening to highlight possible
wastes in the BP for improvement purposes.
According to Liker and Meier (2006, p. 126), the STW chart, STW combination table,
and production capacity sheet are three primary documents for developing STW in man-
ufacturing environments. Since in the transactional office environment, automatic work
done by the machinery without the user’s intervention is rare and the user rarely needs
movement within the work area to perform the work, the STW chart and production
6 T. Ahmadi and N. Rahmani

capacity sheet tools seem irrelevant for developing the STW in the transactional office
environment. However, the STW combination table can be modified and used for devel-
oping STW in the transactional office environment. We call the modified version the
STW combination chart as the graphical part plays a significant role in the Lean office pro-
gramme. This chart is implemented as a smart Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in which all the
required calculations are done, and the outputs are visualized automatically.
In the manufacturing environment, the STW combination table divides the process
workflow into a set of consecutive work elements, and each work element is labelled as
manual work, automatic work, walking, waiting, or a combination of them. Then, the
time required for performing each work element should be presented graphically in
terms of its label(s).
Considering the nature of work in the transactional office environment in which
machinery with the working cycle of loaded by the user (i.e. manual work element), oper-
ating automatically without the user’s intervention (i.e. automatic work element), and
unloaded by the user (i.e. manual work element) is rare, we replace manual and automatic
labels with more relevant labels for business-office work such as searching, executing,
archiving, and checking. Each label is presented with a colour code as shown in
Figure 3 and is specified based on their adapted definition provided by Merriam-
Webster dictionary (Marriam-Webster, 2002) as follows.

. walking: to move on foot and advance by steps,

. archiving: to save or print a piece of information for retrieving in the future,
. searching: to seek something or look for something,
. checking: to compare something with a source, original, or authority,
. waiting: to stay in place and do nothing in expectation of something, and the remain-
ing business-related activities apart from the above-mentioned activities are classi-
fied as execution.

For each (sub-)process, information associated with grey cells should be collected and
filled in. First, the process should be registered by filling in the information about the (sub-)
process, SME(s), and date in the process registration area. Then, the process flow should be
broken down into a set of consecutive work elements in the work element area. Processing
time associated with each work element should be labelled based on the nature of the work
element in the labelling area. Also, for each work element, the required inputs in terms of
consumable material, required software and equipment should be determined by inserting a
checkmark in the required input area. This information is used for training and learning
purposes in the future.
We designed the STW combination chart in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and
upgraded it to a smart form using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming

Figure 3. The STW combination chart for developing STW in the office environment.
 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence 7

language. A smart STW combination chart not only boosts the project performance in
terms of project completion time and accuracy of the calculations but also facilitates
any possible updates in the continuous improvement journey. We can summarize the
main steps required for developing STW for an arbitrary office process in a systematic
way as follows.

1. Developing BPM (i.e. mapping all its sub-processes and their main steps),
2. Developing the STW for each sub-process in the BPM (i.e. documenting all its
required work elements and labelling them in the STW combination chart),
3. Developing the STW overview chart (i.e. integrating information from all the STW
combination charts developed for each sub-process of the process).

4. A case study: invoice checking process

In this section, we consider the invoice-checking process as a pilot business-office process
with more than one sub-process to illustrate how STW documents can be developed. For
simplicity purposes, we choose the invoice-checking process that has been described and
mapped by Dumas et al. (2018, p. 68).

4.1. Description of the Process

The invoice-checking process is an administrative process that can be found in different
functions. When an invoice arrives from a customer, it should be checked for possible mis-
matches. The check may result in either of these three scenarios: i) there are no mis-
matches, then the invoice should be posted, ii) there are mismatches, but these can be
corrected. Then, the invoice should be re-sent to the customer for corrections, iii) there
are mismatches, and they cannot be corrected. Then, the invoice should be blocked.
Once one of these scenarios occurs and the corresponding action is taken, the invoice is
parked, and the process is complete. Recall that for each invoice only one of these scen-
arios occurs.

4.2. The BPM of the Process

As we mentioned before, one of the differences between processes in the manufacturing
and office environments is that business-office processes might have more than one vari-
ation. In other words, at some points within the process depending on the condition (i.e.
which scenario occurs), the process flow might change. With the help of the corresponding
SME(s), the BPM of the invoice-checking process can be developed as follows.
As it is shown in Figure 4, depending on the outcome of the ‘checking invoice for mis-
matching’ step, the invoice checking process might take three different possible paths. We
refer to each of these paths as a sub-process and code them as Sub-processes ‘IC-100-1’,
‘IC-100-2’, and ‘IC-100-3’. Notice that for each invoice only one of the paths occurs. By
collecting information on the occurrence frequency of paths, the occurrence chance of each
path can be predicted.

4.3. STW Combination Chart

According to the depicted BPM in Figure 4, we can develop the corresponding STW charts
for the three sub-processes as presented in Figures 5–7. Figure 5 represents the STW chart
8 T. Ahmadi and N. Rahmani

Figure 4. Invoice checking process map (adapted from Dumas et al. (2018, p. 68)).

Figure 5. STW combination chart of the no mismatches sub-process.

Figure 6. STW combination chart of the correctable mismatches sub-process.

Figure 7. STW combination chart of the non-correctable mismatches sub-process.

 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence 9

for Subprocess ‘IC-100-1’ in which with the help of the SME the workflow of the sub-
process is broken down into a set of consecutive work elements for each of which the pro-
cessing time is divided and labelled in terms of walking, searching, executing, archiving,
checking, and waiting. Also, the required consumable materials, required software, and
equipment are marked by inserting a check mark for each work element. Since the proces-
sing times of the work elements may vary in each repetition of the process, the average
estimation of the processing times provided by the SME should be considered.
For instance, the second work element with the title of ‘open ERP system and find the
invoice in the ERP system’ has a processing time of about 32 seconds and needs software
(i.e. the ERP system). Moreover, the 32-second processing time of this work element is
comprised of a 7-second waiting (i.e. for opening the ERP system), a 15-second searching
(i.e. for finding the invoice), and a 5-second checking (i.e. for comparison). After entering
all the work elements and labelling their processing times, the reaming calculations and
graphical chart will be completed automatically by pressing the Update button. Moreover,
the total processing time per label and the STW cycle time of the sub-process will be cal-
culated in minutes. Similarly, the STW for the Sub-process ‘IC-100-2’ can be developed as
presented in Figure 7. As it is seen, the first three work elements are common between all
the three sub-process. However, they have unique work elements as well.
Due to unique work elements, the STW cycle time of each sub-process might be differ-
ent. For instance, Sub-process ‘IC-100-2’ has a longer STW cycle time compared to Sub-
process ‘IC-100-1’. Similarly, the STW for the Sub-process ‘IC-100-3’ can be developed
as presented in Figure 7.
To make the development of the STW for processes with more than one sub-process
more efficient, we suggest filling in the STW combination chart for the first sub-process
and then using the copy workbook button in Excel to create the STW combination chart
for the other two sub-processes. Using this trick, all the common information and work
elements stay and no reproduction is needed. Of course, the differences can be easily
modified.

4.4. An Overview of the Process

After developing the STW combination chart for all the sub-processes of a process, the
STW overview chart can be created in which all the sub-processes, their chance of occur-
rence, STW cycle time, and the amount of time spent on each work element per sub-
process are listed. Figure 8 represents the STW overview for the invoice-checking
process. The occurrence chance of Sub-processes ‘IC-100-1’, ‘IC-100-2’, and ‘IC-100-
3’ are reported as 90%, 6%, and 4%, respectively. As we can see, the Sub-process ‘IC-
100-1’ occurs 90% of the time and it is the main sub-process.
Moreover, the STW overview chart provides a bigger picture of the entire process by
calculating the expected STW cycle time and expected time spent on each work element.

Figure 8. The STW overview chart of the invoice-checking process.

10 T. Ahmadi and N. Rahmani

This general information about the entire process can facilitate the allocation of the work-
force and the evaluation of the process for continuous improvement initiatives. In other
words, the work elements percentages in the pie chart, highlight the potential improvement
opportunities for Kaizen events. For instance, in Figure 8, 35% of the expected STW cycle
time of the entire process is spent on searching which is a non-added value activity.
According to such an observation, a Kaizen event can be planned to investigate the neces-
sity and efficiency of searching activities and take proper measures to eliminate them from
the process or reduce them.

5. Challenges and limitations

In the literature on Lean management, convincing both the management and front-line staff
to truly understand and accept the lean concepts has been mentioned as one of the biggest
challenges of Lean implementation (Kuriger et al., 2010). Achieving a successful Lean
office programme can be represented by sustainable improvement that requires changes
to both system and people’s mindset (Direction, 2005). Making changes is not straightfor-
ward and often comes with challenges. In this section, we list some challenges that the
STW team might encounter in developing the STW for business-office processes and
provide some remedies to overcome them.
Lack of organizational support. In general, successful continuous improvement initiat-
ive projects require full support from the top management and the engagement of the entire
organisation. In other words, the management team must not only provide sufficient time
and resources for the improvement teams but also ensure appropriate ongoing training con-
cerning Lean tools and techniques for the employees (Rohleder & Silver, 1997). This can
be easily understood by the iceberg of ignorance that emphasizes the fact that a higher per-
centage of business problems are visible to the front-line staff rather than the management
team. The STW as one of the continuous improvement initiatives is not an exception.
Without support from the management and enough cooperation and engagement of the
employees and particularly the corresponding SMEs, the STW efforts face major chal-
lenges and may fail.
SMEs’ resistance. Before starting the STW efforts for a specific process, all the corre-
sponding SMEs should be informed about the objectives and benefits of the STW and its
positive impact on the quality of what they are doing by the STW team. This helps to over-
come the SMEs’ attitude of preventing rather than reacting to problems. Without these
clarifications, the identification of problems or opportunities for improvement might be
mistaken for the negative performance of the SME. In this case, the SMEs may tend to
show a preventive attitude rather than a supportive attitude towards the STW efforts
even if they know that the STW efforts resolve operational issues and reduce process inef-
ficiencies (Matthews et al., 2019). Also, the SMEs might think that the STW might be used
for productivity purposes and it might lead to either allocating more work to them (Huls,
2005) or laying off employees. The bottom line is that clear communication within the
STW team (i.e. between the SMEs and the developer) creates harmony and a supportive
atmosphere. This supportive atmosphere not only can increase the success chance of the
STW efforts but also can guarantee the engagement of the SMEs in the continuous
improvement initiatives with the Lean office programme.
Many sub-processes. Normally, business-office processes are comprised of more than
one subprocess. Since the STW is developed for each sub-process, it is obvious that the
STW efforts for a process increase as the number of its sub-processes increases.
However, the question is what trade-off should be made between the value that STW
 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence 11

provides to the Lean office and the effort that is needed for developing the STW. Recall
that not all the sub-processes of a process have the same occurrence chance. Some sub-pro-
cesses occur rarely and developing the STW for such sub-processes doesn’t have enough
business value. A useful rule of thumb is ignoring the sub-processes with an occurrence
chance of lower than 1% and not having the longest STW cycle time among their sub-pro-
cesses. Also, subprocesses with a very low chance of occurrence are not eligible for the
STW as they might not be repetitive enough. As we proposed, the STW efforts should
be designed in a feasible and tractable manner. As we have proposed in this paper, auto-
mating the STW combination and the STW overview charts in a Microsoft Excel spread-
sheet using VBA programming language makes the STW efforts for processes with a
significant number of sub-processes feasible and tractable.
Conflicting information provided by SMEs. Having more than one working shift and
consequently, more than one SME for a specific process increases the STW efforts
when conflicting process knowledge and information is provided by the SMEs. In this
case, all the corresponding SMEs should be involved in the development of the STW.
This can be done either by inviting all the SMEs to a meeting or by developing the
STW with the help of one SME and reviewing it with the others. We might receive con-
flicting process knowledge and information from different SMEs. When we are dealing
with humans, there will likely be some variability in their behaviour. Therefore, if we
ask an SME to repeat a specific task 100 times, some of them will be done faster than
others (Cachon & Terwiesch, 2019, p. 172).

6. Conclusions and future research directions

In this paper, we addressed the STW as one of the most powerful but least used Lean office
tools for business-office process improvement initiatives. Lean philosophy as a manage-
ment approach for increasing the performance of businesses has been introduced and
applied for more than a century. As a result, a wide range of Lean tools and techniques
have been introduced and developed by practitioners. However, since Lean was invented
and born in the manufacturing environment, there is a misunderstanding that some of the
Lean techniques could not possibly work in the transactional office environment. We
argued that the office functions can take 60% up to 80% of the business efforts; therefore,
the overall business performance can suffer seriously when business-office processes are
not efficient. One of the Lean techniques is STW which serves as a foundation for Lean
management and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no systematic approach
in the Lean literature for utilizing the STW in the transactional office environment.
In this paper, we positioned and highlighted the importance of the STW in the Lean
office programme and proposed a pragmatic and tractable framework for developing the
STW as a Lean office tool. The STW is a highly detailed work procedure that provides
step-by-step guidelines for performing day-to-day process activities. In other words,
STW is a document in which the process workflow is broken down into a set of consecutive
work elements. If STW is applied correctly, it can provide the following substantial
advantages:

. creating a learning platform for organisational and individual learning,

. creating a baseline for Kaizen and continuous improvement initiatives,
. revealing abnormalities and highlighting improvement opportunities,
. facilitating the control of the process and reducing variability,
. improving quality, flexibility, and stability of the outputs.
12 T. Ahmadi and N. Rahmani

Despite the mentioned benefits, STW has been designed based on the nature of pro-
cesses in the manufacturing environment and it has been argued that it cannot be
applied to the business-office processes with more than one sub-process. In this paper,
for developing STW in the transactional office environment, we introduced the ‘STW com-
bination chart’ in which each work element is labelled with walking, searching, executing,
archiving, checking, and waiting. Also, we provided guidelines on how to develop the
STW approach feasibly and practically for a process with more than one sub-process.
To do so, we designed the STW combination chart as a smart Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
using VBA. In this way, the STW can be developed per sub-process, and consequently, the
entire process overview chart is created in an efficient timely manner. We illustrated the
entire STW using a pilot process, i.e. the invoice-checking process with three sub-pro-
cesses. Moreover, we shed light on some challenges and obstacles that the STW team
might face during an STW project in the transactional office environment.
The importance of the STW for the business environment is even more highlighted if
we notice that the STW is a fundamental baseline and facilitating tool for implementing
continuous improvement initiatives such as Kaizen and drive for excellence events.
Even, the STW documents can be used for training the new hires. At a higher managerial
level, the output of the STW can be used for providing a good approximation of the total
workload of a department and making a better balance between workload and the number
of employees.
The traditional BPM techniques try to map an idealized version of the business pro-
cesses based on their static behaviour. However, process mining techniques try to map
the business processes based on their dynamic behaviour during real execution by the
user. Therefore, using process mining techniques, all the variations of business-office pro-
cesses can be mapped and recorded substantially (dos Santos Garcia et al., 2019). Emer-
ging technologies can facilitate and enrich process mining. For instance, Internet-of-
Things (IoT) technology can be utilized for collecting a large amount of real-time data
from the dynamic behaviour of a business-office process that may have different vari-
ations. Then, data mining techniques can be utilised for discovering workflow patterns
(i.e. BPM) in large amounts of data known as Big Data. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence
(AI) techniques can be applied to automatically highlight potential improvement opportu-
nities in the process and provide proper improvement suggestions for implementations. A
new direction for future research can be utilizing emerging technologies such as Big Data,
IoT, and AI for developing the STW for business-office processes. In other words, the up-
to-date actual data and information can be collected using specific software and sensors in
the environment (e.g. IoT) and real-time analysis of the collected information can be done
by combining data mining and AI techniques with our approach (e.g. deciding upon the
number of the sub-processes of a process, number of the work elements of a sub-
process, the processing time of work elements and label them, creating the STW overview
chart) and fill in the STW combination chart automatically. Finally, the business-office
processes can be prioritised for continuous improvement initiatives intelligently based
on their potential improvement magnitude.

7. Limitations
The proposed STW framework for the business-office processes becomes time-consuming
and burdensome when the business-office processes have many sub-processes. In addition,
collecting data for filling the STW combination chart becomes more challenging when the
STW developer faces considerable resistance to changes from the SMEs. Also, when the
 Total Quality Management & Business Excellence 13

STW project is not fully supported by the organizational management team, especially the
top management, the project is likely to fail. Finally, we developed the proposed STW fra-
mework based on the business-office processes in the pharma industry. Therefore, imple-
menting this framework in other industries may need some modifications and changes.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Taher Ahmadi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8928-8172
Nooshin Rahmani http://orcid.org/0009-0002-8479-2190

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