I am often asked to take transactions out of processes as they are seen as non value add activity. What I find amusing is not this lack of understanding or the naivety of driving to such a limited lean dogma, but often its without any real understanding of the underlying process – or what those transactions are for.

The first truth is there is a cost to all transactions

The second truth is transactions add control

The question is then what is the cost of no control or how much do you want to pay for it?

Do you want to know what stage a production order is at? Do you want to know where your inventory or finished goods are? Do you need to manage batch controlled stock? Do your customers want production batch visibility?

If you want to control these things, you have to record them. We can streamline that process, but the transaction still has to happen. So when we say “Less nil value add transactions” let make sure that actually what you mean. As opposed to streamline the ones we need and remove the ones that add no control.