Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control – Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Task

1- What is lean six sigma?
2-Why apply lean six sigma in a call centre?

Case study –The case study focuses on a large corporation in the service sector operating in the vehicle leasing and renting industry: it sells its services to both the general retail public and other businesses in 145 countries and has 22,000 employees and 8,000 locations. Its European call centre was receiving an average of 10,000 calls a month from customers who had an issue with either the level of service received or the billing/invoicing process. The company puts a lot of emphasis on its level of customer service, an integral part of its mission, vision and values, as a differentiator from the competition; its strategic position was that of a quality service, intended to attract those customers who wanted to pay a bit more for a better service, in contrast with its low-cost competitors. Consequently, quality of customer service was a critical component of the company’s strategy: the number of calls received and the more frequent issues reported by customers were continuously analysed and employees’ variable compensation linked to it. The number of contacts received from customers amounted to about 2 per cent of the total transactions (five million a year). The specific objective of the inbound call centre was to deal as quickly and efficiently as possible with those customer.

Define phase
A cross-functional project team was created, led by a black belt, with the objective of using the define, measure, analyse, improve, and control (DMAIC) six sigma breakthrough methodology in order to increase the first-call resolution ratio. The team scoped down the project, identifying which specific areas of the call centre and services they were going to focus on; a high-level process map or suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, customers (SIPOC) (Pyzdek, 2003) was created, followed by a more detailed process map (see Figures 1 and 2).
The team also investigated the seven kinds of waste accordingly to lean principles.
These are:
(1) overproduction;
(2) inventory;
(3) motion;
(4) waiting;
(5) transportation;
(6) over-processing; and
(7) defects.
Of these seven wastes, four were identified as belonging to the current state of the process:

•  Motion: unnecessary movement from the call centre operators, who needed to leave their workstation to perform some routine tasks, e.g. sending/receiving a fax, printing a document;
•  Waiting: sometimes an operator could not answer a customer’s query immediately because they were waiting for an answer from another department or a supervisor;
•  Over-processing: some of the queries from customer could not be addressed on the phone and needed to be dealt with off line by another operator, so creating unnecessary re-work and reducing customer satisfaction;
•  Defects: a query was not always completely solved the first time, forcing customers to call back and so creating unnecessary work and lowering customer.