Definition
Eliminate waste in non-manufacturing processes, establish pull/standard operations/mobility, and improve the quality, delivery and cost of transactional work.
In detail
Transactional Process Improvement (TPI) is a method applying lean principles to non-manufacturing processes, improving the quality, delivery, and cost performance of transactional work by eliminating waste in office processes, establishing pull, and standard work. In the system, it fills the gap beyond manufacturing improvement, allowing processes such as order processing and financial reimbursement to benefit from lean. Its difference from Value Stream Mapping (VSMi) is that VSMi is a diagnostic tool for visualizing information flow; TPI is an improvement tool that directly implements improvements. It typically outputs improved process maps, new standard work, and improvement news reports.
Example in practice
When the finance department's invoice processing cycle is too long, affecting customer payments, managers organize a cross-functional team to first map the current process, discovering duplicate signatures and waiting in the approval steps. Through TPI improvement activities, the process is redesigned, approval nodes are merged, and new standard work is developed. After improvement, invoice processing time shortens, employee workload decreases, and customer satisfaction improves.