ABSTRACT
With only a few weeks of training left, it was time for me to learn the office processes that the former owner, Bob, had always handled and my mother had not begun learning or documenting. I had been focusing on what I considered critical skills in the shop that had previously been handled exclusively by Bob, and now I needed to shift my focus to the front office. (I continue to call it the front office because we also had a small office in the shop where the programming was done along with other tasksattendance records, completing critical measurements, filling in quality sheets-that were performed by the foreman.) I knew that before I had enough background to make any decisions or improvements, I needed to understand the processes in sufficient detail to ask reasonable questions and make educated choices.
