Blog posts tagged with Workflow Optimization

I'll be doing another webinar for Infopeople soon. This one is Optimizing Materials Handling on the Cheap: How to Lean Your Workflow. I hope you'll attend! More info below...

Date:  Thursday, January 30th, 2014

Start Time:          12 Noon Pacific

1PM Mountain

2PM Central

3PM Eastern 

• Is your backroom overrun with book carts full of in-process material?
• Does it take more than a couple hours to get your incoming delivery processed?
• Does it take three days to catch up after a holiday closure?
• Does it take more than four people to get a new acquisition into circulation?
• Can you easily determine the age and status of items on every book cart?

As much as we love our book carts, they have helped us develop some very bad habits, and Lean will help us reduce or eliminate some of these bad habits. Lean is a management philosophy designed to identify and eliminate “waste” in a workflow. Waste can be any number of things including waiting, unnecessary handling or transport, duplicating steps, processing that doesn’t provide any benefit to the customer, and unnecessary hand-offs. By eliminating these wastes, we can find an optimal workflow that will get items to our customers faster and reduce our costs.

If you are going to ALA in Chicago, you might want to take advantage of free consulting from one of the 15-20 consultants that will be providing free consulting sessions during the Consultants Give Back session.  

Find the consultant who can help you at /.  If you find someone with the right skills for your project, contact them and make an appointment ahead of time. There are some drop-in options but most of the consultants require appointments.

Today the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the publication of the new recommended practice: Physical Delivery of Library Resources (NISO RP-12-2012). 

The document focuses on three key areas: the physical move, automation, and the management of physical delivery ranging from labeling and containers to automation and contracting with courier services, this Recommended Practice addresses both the lending and the borrowing library’s activities related to delivering and returning a physical item.

I laud the effort made in putting these recommendations together.  There is a lot of detail and you are bound to pick up some new good ideas.  However, there were also a lot of "it depends" and I found it descriptive in places when it should be have been prescriptive. As we all know, just because many libraries do something a certain way, doesnt' make it a good idea!  Still,I think the work is useful and certainly a worthwhile read for anyone involved in library delivery.

Mick Fortune, of  RFID-Changing Libraries for Good fame notes that the new data model standard released by ISO just a few weeks ago (ISO 28560) “presents both a threat and an opportunity for suppliers. The threat is obvious. Up until now it has proved too difficult for most libraries to switch suppliers once they have purchased an RFID solution.” With the potential for interoperability between RFID systems, the library RFID marketplace may soon face competition.