LehighLean Success Stories

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Work Study Student Hiring Process

After several months of hard work and collaboration, the work study student hiring program information has been added to the Financial Aid website

The website instructions are clear, put the information in one place with helpful links, and allow for a user to easily find the information relevant to their role (student or hiring supervisor).  Anyone who wants to hire a work study student now has all the information they need in one place and it’s an outstanding resource to support students and supervisors.

The Financial Aid department will be sending an email to faculty and staff to let them know that this resource exists and if they are already a work study supervisor, or considering creating a new work-study job, to check out the information on this page.

Mail Center Process Improvement

The Lehigh Mail Center is used primarily by undergraduate students to receive letter mail and packages that are delivered to the university. The Mail Center team facilitated a Lean process improvement initiative to enhance the methods of processing mail and increasing the speed of service for the campus customers. Various team members performed Gemba Walks (site visits and observing current processes) to identify wastes and determine appropriate countermeasures to improve the mail center processes.

Over two dozen potential enhancements were identified, including these notable changes:

  • Doubling the number of processing stations

  • Streamlining the package labeling process using new technology

  • Expanding employee training

  • Improving the package shelving process for easier and faster package retrieval

  • Utilizing a larger delivery truck for large pick-ups

These improvements will enable the Mail Center to achieve the target processing time for mail and package pickup to 2 ½ minutes.

Mold Emergency Response Project

Our students experience a lot while on our campus and in our residence halls. Some of the experiences can be stressful. In the summer of 2018, the excessive heat and humidity introduced a new challenge for our students and for our staff in Housing Services, Facilities Services, and Environmental Health and Safety. Our teams found mold in a number of residence hall rooms and apartments. At that time, we didn't have a defined or easily repeatable process to resolve these complaints, resulting in inconsistency in handling them.

Using LehighLean, a cross functional team was formed, consisting of Housing Services, Facilities, and Environmental Health and Safety personnel, to create a process that could quickly address and resolve the many issues that arise when remediating mold. The team outlined goals that included: saving time, improving the student experience, reducing potentially negative press, improving collaboration between departments, enhancing communication with students (and often parents), and saving financial resources.

The team mapped the current process, identified and eliminated waste (in time and resources), and developed new solutions to address mold issues at Lehigh. Read more.

DocuSign eSignature Project

The DocuSign eSignature project revealed the power of Lean to reduce waste and dramatically improve efficiencies across the university.

A cross-functional team was formed to lead this LehighLean project to select and then implement a document routing and eSignature solution at Lehigh. The intent was to  re-engineer basic service and operating processes to enable elimination of low value added tasks, strengthen operating and security controls, protect sensitive data, and eliminate paper from the ecosystem. eSignature capability enables fully paperless processes and eliminates manual steps, including reducing human error, lead times on processes and allowing Lehigh faculty, staff, students and parents to experience the benefits of these improvements in real time.

Purchasing Services executed 17 large construction contracts in 2019. Each one averages 70 pages. At $.050 per page (costs includes paper, toner, and printer related costs), the cost merely to print construction contracts for signature was $100. Purchasing Services executed 77 Master Service Agreements in 2019. Each one is 26 pages. At $.050 per page, the cost to print MSAs was $60. Purchasing spent $160 in 2018 just to print 2 types of contracts solely for the purposes of obtaining a signature. This does not include the hundreds of other contract types that are printed for signature each year. And this represents savings for only one department. 

The graphic below illustrates the environmental impact associated with the reduced paper processing; the volume of documents routing through the system, and the improved processing time achieved through the use of this technology.