Webinar: Optimizing Materials Handling on the Cheap: How to Lean Your Workflow

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.

In this webinar, we will:

• Identify several library materials handling workflows that would benefit from a Lean process
• Work through the steps of identifying the “uniquely library” types of waste
• See how to improve the flow
• Revisit library successes that have implemented Lean projects and
• Find out how they put the principles to good use.
• Provide you the tools you need to get started optimizing your library’s materials handling workflows without spending more than the cost of this webinar!

At the end of this one-hour webinar, participants will:

• Understand the definition of “Lean”
• Learn five key principles of Lean
• Understand how focusing on efficiency can lead to poor process workflows
• Be able to identify key materials handling workflows that can be improved with Lean methodology
• Learn the steps for re-engineering a process workflow according to Lean principles
• Learn about the library specific pitfalls that create workflow problems (and how to address them)
• Have a list of useful resources for getting started

This webinar will be of interest to circulation and technical services supervisors and staff, delivery personnel, and anyone interested in saving time and money and improving services for their library customer.

For more information and to participate in the Thursday, January 30th webinar, go tohttps://infopeople.org/civicrm/event/info?id=368.

Webinars are free of charge, you can pre-register by clicking on the Register Nowbutton (at the top and bottom of this page). If registering with less than 30 MINUTES from the start of the webinar you can join directly from the thank you page by clicking the Join Now button. If you pre-registered you will receive an email with login link and a reminder email the day before the event.

If you are unable to attend the live event, you can access the archived version the day following the webinar.  Check our archive listing at:  https://infopeople.org/training/view/webinar/archived