Design, innovation, quality. Ideagroup is one of the leading groups in Italy in the production of bathroom furniture. Sintesia Srl has been chosen by the group for a lean office project aimed at the entire commercial structure, in Italy and internationally. In particular, the project is aimed at improving the back office activities of the sales office, i.e. the organization, design, and implementation of sales and customer service.

If the final objective is always the improvement of customer service, the main objectives of the project comprised the following:

• to carry out a precise analysis of the order cycle by mapping the management and transfer of the entire document flow (from the arrival of the quote request or customer order to invoicing);
• to reduce the waste associated with the process by precisely mapping all non-value-added activities;
• to reduce the Lead Time of the order, i.e. the time that elapses from the moment an order is received to the moment it is delivered;
• to re-engineer internal processes by the end of 2020 to create a sustainable system in which the exchange of documents involving multiple functions – purchasing, sales, technical, logistics, and administration – leads to low organizational impacts.

Led by the consultant Sintesia, the working groups, formed by the two company teams that work daily on the process, have defined its phases through the Gemba Walk and mapped the activities through the Makigami, highlighting the most important metrics for each activity.

With the Makigami, it was possible to intuitively distinguish activities and sub-activities of the Value Stream, making visible the information and document exchange that takes place between the company functions, and giving an immediate view of the activities. For each activity, the time needed was then detected, dividing it into value-added time (VA) and non-value-added time (NVA) and highlighting, out of about 90 activities, over 70 NVA.