'Work in Progress' is a key form of muda or waste in lean philosophy. The key is to eliminate waste coming into the system. Employees need to be empowered to, s

'Work in Progress' is a key form of muda or waste in lean philosophy. The key is to eliminate waste coming into the system. Employees need to be empowered to, send straight back incomplete paperwork and to update the forms & instructions coming into the system that are contributing to the waste. Considering the gravitational mass of all these processes I would work on bringing lean manufacturing approaches in first before deriving a computer based solution. As per all these things its going to take a lot of leadership to drive any type of real change. Ref: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing