ABSTRACT
Paperwork reduction is broken out here as a separate discussion because it is really a special category of garbage and material waste, and responds well to slightly adapted versions of the general tools outlined elsewhere in this book. From a Lean perspective, the cost of paper itself accounts for only a small fraction of the total true cost of using paper in an office. The cost of using paper is often an order of magnitude more than the sticker price of the material. Consider that even at minimum wage, the cost of a worker spending three minutes handling a piece of paper is 10 times greater than the cost of the printed paper itself.1
