In this economy, businesses are cutting costs left and right. One local business hopes to help them in that endeavor.

The Lean Institute at the University of Oklahoma specializes in aiding businesses to save time and costs by cutting out waste.

"It's a prime time, you know, for people to take advantage of (the institute)," said Terry Smith, program director. "There's never been a better time."

The institute began in 2004, starting with a contract with Tinker Air Force Base. Within the past year, the institute has been expanding to other government entities and private companies.

It plans to expand its customer base even more as companies are looking to save money in this recession.

The Lean Institute is part of the College of Continuing Education at OU and is a self-sustaining business. The institute uses time and energy saving principles called Lean and Six Sigma to improve business actions.

"It's not just us, it's the tools -- they work every time," Smith said.

When a company hires the Lean Institute, the staff of three looks to independent contractors to bring expert advice to each company. The institute has project coaches that they assign to different companies based on their individual expertise.

The contractors then meet with the people actually involved in the process they want to improve. They get the employees involved because when all the different aspects of one process are put together it is often apparent what needs to change.

The Lean Institute doesn't dictate what needs to change, but instead gets input from those affected by the change so that the employees take ownership of it.

"Our job is to really teach them how to do it so we can step aside and they can take over," Smith said.

Despite the effort to involve all parties in the decisions and changes, Assistant Program Director Max Dugan said there are sometimes still people that are resistant to change. They've been doing the same thing the same way for years, and it takes them a while to realize that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way.

"People get into their routines and it's amazing how inflexible they are about moving it," Dugan said.

Smith stressed that when processes are found to be efficient, it's not normally the workers' faults. Instead, it's the time between each step in the process that makes it inefficient, she said.

"Most people really want to do a good job, they do the best they can with what they have," Smith said.

In addition to working in a consultant capacity with businesses, the Lean Institute also teaches a class within the College of Continuing Education to train people in the principles of the institute, said Marc Jensen, Lean Institute staff assistant. The class can be used to earn course credit of earn Green Belt certification, which is the industry standard in efficiency principles, he said.

In order to be certified, class participants work on a project within their line of work, to improve a process by saving a significant amount of money -- to the tune of about $25,000.

At Tinker Air Force Base, the Lean Institute helped the Air Force save more than $200,000 over the course of three years just by changing the process of how the utility bill was paid, Dugan said.

The process to validate the bill was so long that every month it was paid late. When utilities were on such a large scale, that translated to whopping late fees.

The Lean Institute helped the staff at Tinker come up with a way to shorten the process so the bill could be paid on time each month, which translated to huge savings.

The ideas implemented at Tinker were so successful that they made their way up the chain of command in the Air Force and were even briefed to the secretary of the Air Force, Dugan said. Air Force bases around the country may even have implemented the same time-saving processes, he said.

The Lean Institute is working with the OU Health Sciences Center to improve the process of travel reimbursements, Smith said. At OU, faculty and staff who travel for their job are required to put the expenses on their personal credit card and then wait to get reimbursed by the university. The process of reimbursement is slow, however, and it can sometimes take three to four months to get it, Smith said. Meanwhile, employees are forced to pay the interest on their credit cards and aren't reimbursed for that expense, she said.

"Everyone was in agreement that it took way too long to get the money back for people who traveled and had several thousand dollars on their credit card," Smith said.

The Lean Institute began working with OU HSC staff and already has reduced the processing time by about 20 percent, Smith said. And they haven't even gotten to the bulk of the process, she said. She said once the process has been refined she hopes it will be implemented across all OU campuses.

The institute worked on another project at Tinker that they are now bringing to OU. By merely turning off the light inside of vending machines at the base, the base saves about $75 per year on energy for each machine. That translates to about $150,000 per year for the 2,000 vending machines on the base.

Jensen said OU is saving energy and money by turning off the lights inside its about 450 vending machines, too.

One satisfied customer of the Lean Institute is Rita Aragon, director of OU's Advanced Programs, which provides graduate degrees to members of the armed forces at bases around the world.

Aragon, a retired major general, saw the Lean Institute's work first-hand when she was at Tinker Air Force Base. When she came to OU a little more than a year ago, she requested to use the services of the Lean Institute.

"We knew we had a lot of processes that were a bit cumbersome," she said. So the Lean Institute began working with Advanced Programs staff to improve the process of course registration.

The consultations with the Lean Institute have paid off, Aragon said.

"We have quantitative analysis that shows it saved us time, which saves us money," she said. Now without the aid of the institute, Advanced Programs staff members are using the same principles to improve other areas of their work, Aragon said.

Advanced Programs was actually the first department within OU that utilized the institute, which astonished Aragon when she arrived.

"I said I can't believe other people haven't used it -- the Air Force has saved millions," she said, and "we have the institute right here in our own college."

Staff at the Lean Institute hope more people at the university, as well as private-sector businesses in the area, take advantage of it.

For more information, visit lean.ou.edu or call 325-9135.

Julianna Parker Jones 366-3541 jparker@normantranscript.com