Manish Pharasi1314164364

Pranoti, I would give you a brief on how and where to apply Lean in an accounts receivable process in general. These ideas can be easily customized for your specific case. Big Ys in Accounts Receivable: Your biggest Objective in accounts receivable is to collect 100% of the money and on time. These are actually your Big Ys in an accounts receivable process. Value Stream: In case of a service company you may look at the Value Stream from the time the service is delivered till the time money is collected. Now you can look at and understand the various types of wastes that are happening in this value stream which would direcly lead to either delays in receiving the money or not receiving money at all. You can visualize the ideal Value stream for the above process (from delivering service till receiving money). Improvement Strategy: Make and implement an improvement plan for the wastes identified in the Value Stream Analysis above with an objective to reach the Future state. Some Dos: For best possible results ensure the following: 1. Build a case for improving the Accounts receivable process. Highlight the current problems and their negative impacts on your business. Support this with actual data. 2. Involve all key stakeholders. Also when doing VSM do involve people who are actually doing the tasks. This makes a huge difference. Hope this helps. Let me know in case you have any further queries.

Renu..Six Sigma Implementation is highly applicable in the areas you have mentioned. Below is the list of projects that have been done in the areas you have asked for. Loan Department 1. Reducing the cycle time to Process a Loan Application (both Mortgage & Personal loans). 2. Improving the Customer Information gathering processes. 3. Improving the Credit Evaluation Process 4. Improving Productivity of loan processing agents Account Opening 1. Reducing the time to open an account 2. Reducing errors in account opening process. 3. Reducing rework in processing customer applications Other Projects in Retail Banking 1. Reducing the Credit Card Delivery time. 2. Reducing Bank Statements Processing & Delivery time. 3. Reducing the errors in money transfer 4. Improving accuracy, timeliness and completeness of customer communication. 5. Developing new products (timeliness, business potential) 6. Improving Market Share of existing banking products. 7. Improving the Branch Banking Processes Hope this helps.

Adding to what Vishwadeep has said, some more Telecom company specific areas where Six Sigma has been successfully implemented are: 1. Reducing the Billing Errors, Timeliness of Billing. 2. Improving the Call Completion Ratio, which is a result of Network Quality. This has a direct impact on revenue (this was incidentally my First Black Belt Project). 3. Timeliness and Quality of New Schemes that are launched from time to time 5. Improving ARPU (Average revenue per unit) 6. Reducing Customer Churn 7. Improving Sales Productivity

In addition to the points made by Nitin, I would like to add that Six Sigma enables a complete transformation in your thinking process. You would start to see most of things "end to end" which means that your approach will be more process oriented rather than functional oriented. This means that you start looking at any work that is done as part of a larger objective or goal instead of getting lost in your narrow individual departmental objective. This is indeed a very big change in approach if you look at the way people work in almost every organization. Almost all organizations work around functions and departments which is not the best model for an organization. The result is waste, rework, delays and all kinds of bottlenecks that creep into the working systems. The reason being no one is thinking "end to end". Everyone has a narrow focus. Even a profitable organization will have lot of costs and waste due to the lack of this "end to end" thinking. Any CEO will love to have people with this kind of thinking and approach. Therefore, for a student to develop this thinking process will be a big plus when working in an organization.

My experience says that having a parallel Six Sigma and Lean organizations end up as competing organizations and becomes a ripe ground for a political battle between the two respective leaders (I won't name the organization but I have seen this first hand). The organization is the loser in the end. Conceptually speaking there is no conflict between the two approaches and a blended approach becomes really powerful. Lean having come from Practice to Theory has its own inherent strengths specially when it comes to Process Analysis, inventory management and productivity improvements. Thus,broadly speaking Lean is most powerful when it comes to improving the Business Process Efficiency or the "efficiency metrics". On the other hand core strength of Six Sigma lies in reducing "variation" in the process which translates to improving the Business Process Effectiveness measures. Hence, broadly six sigma is best when it comes to impacting the effectiveness metrics that have strong correlation with customer satisfaction. Now coming to the strategic level and operational level implementation, my experience says that the best structure is wherein we have a single leader who may be called as an "Operational Excellence Leader", "Process Improvement Leader" and so on. This leader reports to the CEO or the SBU Head (depending on the type of organization). Under him we have the "belts" or persons who are trained in both Lean & Six Sigma. The primary objective of this organization is to help in achieving breakthrough business results on revenue enhancement, cost reduction, customer satisfaction etc. The initiatives that they lead or mentor come under the umbrella of "Business Process Improvement". They are free to use the most appropriate tools and techniques for a particular initiative. There is no seperate "six sigma project" or a"lean project" but a "process improvement project" which will operationalize the integrated (lean+six sigma) approach. This diverts the focus and energies of this group towards giving business results by way of process improvements instead of getting lost in "six sigma vs lean debate". Moreover, when these belts train the operators or grass root level people they would equip them with the basic tools needed at that level by naming them "process improvement tools" instead of categorizing them as "six sigma tools" or "lean tools" seperately. This naming itself would play a major role in operationalizing the blended approach and thereby enabling the organization to benefit from the strengths of both Lean and Six Sigma.

Would like to share one of my experience of working with a government agency on an improvement initiative. It is actually a first hand experience of building the blocks necessary for launching a six sigma initiative in one of the governemnt agencies in Dubai. It was in governments Roads and Transport Authority. I firmly believe that when it comes to government a pre-requisite for launching a six sigma initiative is doing the ground work thorougly. Therefore, as a first step there we first defined the services that were offered to various agencies by the Roads and Transport Authority. These services were in the domains of Information Technology, HR, Finance , Procurement & Contracts. The Service Levels to be provided were agreed between the RTA and its agencies and a governance matrix was prepared for those. In the first phase 60 services were identified out of which 25 were critical. Next step was to define and map the processes that were delivering these services. KPIs were defined for each of these processes. These KPIs were identified and were linked to the corresponding Service Level that was agreed with each of the agency. Thus , in short each SLA was linked to the KPIs of the processes. Monitoring & tracking mechanisms for these KPIs were put in place. In gist, this ended up linking the Service Management with BPM (Business Process Management). This had an impact of creating the culture of metrics management in the organization which paved the way for a more effiecient and effective launching of a six sigma initiative. It was infact an arduous task with challenges at each stage. I just tried to narrate a brief story above. Questions and comments are welcome!