The Unsung 20%
Many Continuous Improve (CI) programs suggest using the 80/20 rule. In this, the team determines a list of root causes for an issue, defines a numeric ranking for each one as a percentage of 100, and then adds them up, listing the highest to the lowest. The results are then displayed in graphic form, often in a Pareto chart. Conventional methods then recommend focusing on the top 80% of the root causes, as the other 20% may be a list of several small issues. Often, these smaller issues are not ever addressed, and are simply placed as a footnote in the presentation. Conversely, they can be used as a starting place for another project. Again, the team can focus on the top 80% of that group, resulting in an additional 16% on the root causes being addressed, or 96% total. It is important that a CI team remembers to take another look at the 20% that was not originally addressed, based on the Pareto chart. When some original issues are resolved, other smaller issues may begin to express themselves. While 20% may not sound like a lot, it can make a big difference in the long run with a systematic approach! How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreA Ringing Endorsement: Using Six Sigma to Improve Call Center Operations
When was the last time you called a company and got connected to their call center? Were you stuck on hold for what seemed like an eternity? Or was the service representative less than helpful? Let’s face it. Call center performance can make or break any service provider’s customer loyalty ratings. Customer service representatives need to be able to answer the phone. They need to resolve questions quickly. Hold time needs to be minimal and at or under the customer’s expectation. Yet these important metrics, taken alone, with little or no regard to other client-affecting service level indicators, can lead to a loss of business. I read an interesting case study recently about a call center in that predicament. At first, call center leadership didn’t realize that the center’s performance was a problem – until there were rumblings that the organization’s contract was about to be cancelled because of poor service. When faced with this issue, many call centers just lay off staff in an attempt to increase productivity of the remaining group, or try to improve results by forcing people to be on the phone even more. This call center took a difference approach. They enlisted the help of a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) expert to improve their performance. The call center began collecting data around its operations and what customers wanted. The results were eye-opening: Most calls that could not be resolved on the first call required some research by the service representatives. The service representatives were primarily judged on whether they were available to answer calls. This limited the time they could devote to research open issues. As a result, many calls that could not be resolved right away were often never resolved. Customers whose inquiries were not answered within a few days would call back. This increased the call volume, increasing the numbers of calls that could not be resolved on the first call, and led to multiple entries in the computer system for the same problem. Baseline data showed that the call center was achieving only a 50 percent first-call resolution rate and 62 percent five-day resolution rate. Furthermore, service representatives with the highest available-to-answer rates had the lowest resolution rate. Interestingly, there was no correlation between available-to-answer and first-call resolution – so just increasing the time that people were available to answer calls would not necessarily drive up the first-call resolution rate. The call center decided to implement several improvements: They divided employees into two groups. Part of the staff would only take calls and the rest would do the research to resolve the issues. Representatives rotated through the two groups, with daily metrics designed for success, collected individually and reported in a central location. Significant drops in first-call resolution now immediately trigger follow-up action. The call center’s IT department tweaked the computer system to utilize an unused field in the screens to capture issues needing research and the age of those issues. After four days, calls that were not resolved were forwarded to the leadership team for action. Within weeks, the first-call resolution rate dramatically increased from 50% to 90% and the five-day resolution rate rose from 62% to 98%. LSS can be a great tool for getting call center performance back on track. By focusing on what the client needs, developing a process around those needs and tracking key performance metrics, a call center can become a true asset to the organization as a whole. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes...
Read MoreFlavor of the Month Syndrome
There are a lot of things that sound good, and may be very good for a short term, but overall, they don’t last. We noticed this on our recent trip to the State Fair. We found deep-fried brownies, deep-fried Pepsi, and even deep-fried Kool Aid – about anything you can imagine had been deep-fried. Each of these stations had a few novel-seekers in line. However the longest lines were at the more tried-and-true vendors, such as tenderloin sandwiches and grilled cheese sandwiches. How can you go wrong with those? Similar to fair food, many businesses adopt business plans that are the deep-fried flavor of month syndrome. They may sound good on paper, but they really do not have any lasting value. It is imperative that Continuous Improvement (CI) programs be founded on principles to ensure their sustainability. These principles include executive/managerial support, employee education and involvement, and the right goals. Without each of these three components, a CI program is assured to fail. First, it is important that a company’s leadership team supports the CI program. Often significant changes are required in business practices. Without management support, these cannot occur. It is also important that management provide ways to support their CI teams by eliminating road blocks and helping to gain buy-in from hesitant stakeholders. Second, it’s important that employees understand the basics of a CI program and truly be involved in it. It can’t be just a few people orchestrating an improvement plan that ultimately will affect everyone. The third and most key ingredient is the setting of proper goals. Too many times, employees see a CI program as a methodology for reducing the workforce and/or slashing budgets. This should never be the goal of a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project or program. LSS is designed to reduce waste and eliminate errors. By combining these two aspects in its goal-setting, the company can be much more productive and therefore save money. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreModel Cells to Start a Lean Journey
ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value recently shared an interesting case study about a large California hospital system that found a unique way to replicate exceptional patient care across its many service sites. The Palo Alto Medical Foundation for Health Care, Research and Education (PAMF) is a well-respected health care organization serving the health needs of more than a million patients who live in four counties in the San Francisco Bay area. PAMF employs 1,500 physicians and approximately 5,000 employees across more than 40 different locations. Like many large health care organizations, PAMF’s rapid growth in recent years led to consistent care quality across the organization, but the patient experience varied. Yet patient satisfaction surveys showed that patients wanted the same experience no matter what location they went to for care. As these service conundrums continued to develop, PAMF’s leaders soon discovered that Lean Six Sigma tools could help them create a model of care that meets patient expectations and replicate it at their many locations. After benchmarking with ThedaCare and hiring leaders experienced in LSS, PAMF’s management team began to realign its primary care delivery system at 40 locations using lean principles. Borrowing from ThedaCare’s success, they started with the “model cell” concept to align everyone with the goal of improving the patient experience. What is a “model cell”? Let’s say you’re a large hospital system like PAMF. Is it realistic to find the training and financial resources to help the entire organization “go Lean” all at once? Probably not. But if you start with one department where the leaders are excited and eager to be the first, you can set a model for the rest of the system to learn from. The cell model becomes a demonstration project, a proof concept, that shows real change and real results. Otherwise, if you try to implement LSS across an organization without adequate training and support, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and accomplishing little. That is how LSS fails – by not showing results. PAMF found that the model cell was the best way to help staff learn about LSS principles. The leadership team used this approach to show the rest of the organization what “exceptional care” looks like. This generated excitement among staff, and best practices from the model cell began to spread organically. Ironically, one of PAMF’s initial successes had more to do with staff satisfaction than with bottom-line improvements. It turns out that juggling a million priorities was creating staff burnout. LSS helped alleviate the problem and get team members home for dinner with their families. They teamed up nurses and medical assistants to work more closely with physicians to quickly and efficiently identify patient concerns, communicate the concern with the physician and speed the process of actual patient care. This improved not only staff satisfaction, but patient satisfaction as well. If you haven’t read the case study, it’s definitely worth the read. Today, PAMF’s lean initiatives are focused on continuous improvement with a concentrated effort to bring daily engagement into the organization’s specialty care areas. Kudos to the PAMF team making LSS applicable in day-to-day work and improving care for its patients. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreDoctors and Dynamite
I enjoy reading about how organizations began using Lean and Six Sigma (LSS) in their business. Often companies bring in consultants to plan and execute projects, train staff on LSS methodologies, or both. I find it more interesting to read how enterprises can find help from non-obvious sources. I recently read in the August issue of Quality Magazine about a teaching healthcare system that, with a little help from the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership, decided to think outside of the box on their LSS program. Ellis Medicine teamed up with a dynamite manufacturer in Cincinnati to have two of its staff members trained in LSS principles. These “Lean Leaders” then went back to Ellis Medicine looking for obvious projects (aka low-hanging fruit). Ellis’ first project focused on laboratory blood sample turnaround time (TAT). By reducing TAT, the team saved an estimated $600,000. Based on this success, Ellis established 6 team projects in various areas of the system. While each project had some savings, two in particular stand out. A critical shortage of IV pumps was resolved, resulting in savings of $500,000. Another team identified laboratory tests that could be performed in-house, providing savings of $1 million. As busy professionals we have a tendency to focus on what is happening within our own field. By exploring alternatives outside our main industry, we often find outside-the-box solutions and a greater appreciation for programs such as LSS. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreCreativity and Lean Six Sigma = Oil and Water?
There’s a misperception that Lean Six Sigma’s (LSS) structured approach to quality, with its focus on reducing errors and eliminating waste, stifles creativity for companies desperately seeking to nurture a culture of innovation. But this line of reasoning assumes that there’s only one kind of creativity that leads to innovation — disorderly chaos. Methodology is mutually exclusive in the processes that lead to those eureka moments of real discovery and innovation. To the contrary, Colorado-based Arrow Electronics, Inc. is just one example of an organization that has embraced LSS to strengthen its innovative culture. In fact, for the second year in a row, Arrow walked away with “Innovation of the Year” honors at the 2017 Lean & Six Sigma World Conference, one of the leading conferences on business process improvement. Arrow, a global provider of products, services and solutions to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and enterprise computing solutions, won for its Lean Sigma Drones project. This project combines drone technology, video technology and a rapid-improvement methodology to observe Arrow’s extensive warehouse operations from a birds-eye view and more effectively identify areas for continuous improvement. The project has already increased the efficiency of targeted processes by 82 percent and eliminated more than 6.5 million walking steps in warehouse processes since Arrow launched it in late 2016. Employee feedback spurred the innovative drone project. Arrow warehouse employees reported it was much easier to observe processes and identify areas for improvement from a higher vantage point. Using drones, they can now see more than they ever could before, and all in 4K resolution. To ensure operational excellence and nurture a culture of innovation, Arrow offers regular LSS training to its employees. Aside from training, Arrow also conducts regular audits in every distribution center, making sure the problems are always identified and innovative best practices are widely shared, to improve operational performance and achieve high ROIs. Arrow’s team has creatively tackled other projects, like modifying a race car to be safely driven at speeds over 100 mph using just the head movements and breath from a quadriplegic driver. Or a pheromone-based pest control system that uses an insect’s own natural communication methods to prevent damage to fruit crops. Or transforming cargo containers into fully-equipped classrooms and health clinics to be used across Africa. Or even engineering sensors that help dairy farmers better manage livestock health and optimize milk production. And, smart smoke detectors that are designed to be a more effective early warning system. To say that LSS, because of its emphasis on planning and measurement, is incompatible with innovation isn’t necessarily the case. What may be an even bigger mistake is to assume that providing no framework for idea-generation supports, rather than limits, the entrepreneurial spirit, and that boundaries are just buzzkill. This view doesn’t recognize that the problem-solving that is foundational to LSS is a creative process itself. Furthermore, the LSS emphasis on collaboration and team-building unleashes the power of ideas and their synergies when cross-functional team members connect to think about possibilities rather than problems – and those teams rely on the imagination of each individual member. Creativity and LSS are a winning combination for any organization desiring a better way to conduct business. What’s been your experience with building a culture of innovation at your organization? I’d love to hear your observations! How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
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