Unlike the customary system of performance measurement wherein the machinery was evaluated to find the contribution of the team, nowadays, it seems coherent to assess the team to find the ROI.
A DMAIC project was applied in the Business Process Management (BPM) application support team for an IT-BPO.
The company had made a contractual agreement with the clients to provide a 10% increment in productivity every year. The company served 16 different customers for a myriad of services. And, for providing a seamless service, the company worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
For the IT-BPO services, measuring the amount of productivity was a challenging task. More so, increasing the promised productivity levels, required a DMAIC project to break down the plausible areas where improvement could be done.The Six Sigma team categorized the tasks and the consultants who took up these tasks. It was found that the Level 1 (L1) consultants performed the repetitive tasks, while the more advanced work was done by the Level 2 (L2) consultants. A quantifiable metric was defined, and a subsequent time and motion study revealed that there were no demarcated margin between the work of an L1 and an L2 consultant.
A daily activity chart was prepared based on the customers, and the kinds of work the team had to perform for the clients. The average range of work utilization was set between 65-85% and thus, the over utilized or underutilized resources were discovered.
Next, a fishbone analysis was done to find out why certain resources were investing more time and effort which revealed that the volume of work was the root cause behind the Business Process Management’s overutilization of its consultants. A corrective measure was to merge the over-working and the under-working resources, but that meant merging people from different geographical locations, as well as a significant investment in training employees with cross-functional knowledge.
The DMAIC project suggested improvement techniques to make both the suggested resolutions to work. The team was consolidated, and a thorough knowledge management saw a major improvement in productivity. The second approach was to reduce the effort.
To sustain the improvements the Business Process Management introduced the concept of time sheet entry, and a control chart, which gave an insight as to how and when the process became out-of-control.
The Lean Six Sigma project was successful in even utilization of resources, reducing the over-utilized percentage from 240 to a 90. The DMAIC implementation in BPM also helped save cost by reducing as many as 10 full time resources
See full story on isixsigma.com