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Casual Articles - Six Sigma Service at the Speed of Lean
In the modern age where the business environment is fast growing, companies need more security and accuracy. Biometric time clocks are convenient devices that offer these features. A biometric time clock is the electronic version of the timecard-punching machine. It uses human body parts as identification markers for employees.Biometric time clock parts include a main terminal with a cable, a serial port adapter, user memory, transaction memory, time clock motor, stamp handle, drive cam, and battery. Other parts include timecard racks, timecards, and time clock ribbon and cartridges. Timecard
Proactive methods are those where you take the initiative to gather customer information and include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups etc.
This information ensures that improvement targets you set are based on customer needs.
Make the Relevant Processes Visible:
The relevant processes target for improvement should be observed and mapped. This is not very easy to do, considering the nature of services. However with the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders and
Data driven decision-making seems to be a hot topic in healthcare today. Actually, it is a process that manufacturers have used a long time. The Toyota Quality process is built upon data; it is one reason they are the leading maker of quality auto products. Using this concept in healthcare will lead to improved outcomes both for patients and providers. It does take a focused effort to use such an approach.Let me first illustrate two situations where providers either chose to ignore evidence or had not collected evidence and were making errors because of this. In the report of research on al
The Ubiquity of Services:
We encounter services everywhere, from health care, hospitality, and transport to government, retail and financial services. Even within manufacturing organisations, a significant portion of the activities are service related.
The Visibility Challenge:
While services are everywhere, the steps involved in the processes are difficult to visualise. For instance where on a production line, you can directly see the amount of work in process, or measure lead time by following a work piece from one end of the process to the other, the same is not always possible with services. An observer would be hard pressed to say how much work in process a data analyst working mainly with his computer has.
The Prevalence of Waste:
Services are generally prone to waste. A major reason is that there is usually too much work in process. These may be sales orders, reports on a desk awaiting review or approval, emails to be responded to, or customers waiting to be served. Up to 90% of the time work spends in process it is just waiting.
Substantial work in process makes services slow, which drives up costs and makes them prone to poor quality.
Other common wastes include people moving around chasing information, documents looping back and forth where items are being clarified, interruptions etc.
The High Variation in Demand:
Services, particularly those dealing directly with customers generally face highly variable demand. Consider the case of hotel clerks checking in guests. There will be periods of low activity and at other times many guests will be in queue, waiting to be checked in. The situation is similar in a restaurant or shopping mall. The impact of such variation on WIP is significant.
The Relative Absence of Hard Data:
Service personnel are not accustomed to the same level of rigor in collecting and analysing data as their manufacturing counterparts.
Applying Lean Six Sigma to Improve Services
Define Improvement Targets on the Basis of VOC:
Use reactive and proactive means to listen to the voice of the customer.
Reactive methods are those where the customer takes the initiative through complaints, compliments, enquiries, web page hits, emails and the like. Reactive methods are good at detecting service weaknesses as customers will most likely contact you when they have problems.
Proactive methods are those where you take the initiative to gather customer information and include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups etc.
This information ensures that improvement targets you set are based on customer needs.
Make the Relevant Processes Visible:
The relevant processes target for improvement should be observed and mapped. This is not very easy to do, considering the nature of services. However with the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders and
Here are a few of the perils of Internet job searching: e-mail harvesters, affiliate hunters, identity thieves, money launderers, crooks looking for mules, and traffickers in stolen goods.And these are just some of the scams I've come across this year.There are thousands of these job scams online; that's the bad new. The good news is that there are thousands of legitimate jobs online too. The art is in distinguishing between the two -- and yes, it is an art -- and yes, it is possible. But it takes some work.I own an online job service, so I see online jobs every day of the year, an
The Prevalence of Waste:
Services are generally prone to waste. A major reason is that there is usually too much work in process. These may be sales orders, reports on a desk awaiting review or approval, emails to be responded to, or customers waiting to be served. Up to 90% of the time work spends in process it is just waiting.
Substantial work in process makes services slow, which drives up costs and makes them prone to poor quality.
Other common wastes include people moving around chasing information, documents looping back and forth where items are being clarified, interruptions etc.
The High Variation in Demand:
Services, particularly those dealing directly with customers generally face highly variable demand. Consider the case of hotel clerks checking in guests. There will be periods of low activity and at other times many guests will be in queue, waiting to be checked in. The situation is similar in a restaurant or shopping mall. The impact of such variation on WIP is significant.
The Relative Absence of Hard Data:
Service personnel are not accustomed to the same level of rigor in collecting and analysing data as their manufacturing counterparts.
Applying Lean Six Sigma to Improve Services
Define Improvement Targets on the Basis of VOC:
Use reactive and proactive means to listen to the voice of the customer.
Reactive methods are those where the customer takes the initiative through complaints, compliments, enquiries, web page hits, emails and the like. Reactive methods are good at detecting service weaknesses as customers will most likely contact you when they have problems.
Proactive methods are those where you take the initiative to gather customer information and include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups etc.
This information ensures that improvement targets you set are based on customer needs.
Make the Relevant Processes Visible:
The relevant processes target for improvement should be observed and mapped. This is not very easy to do, considering the nature of services. However with the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders and
It is easy to work in your business and be doing the same thing day after day. If you recognise this, now is a good time to inject new ideas into your business. The process is easy and your results can be invaluable.Define your objective1. Agree a focus for your new ideas: to improve your marketing, to solve a production problem, to present your products better, to reduce your wastage. Then polish this to make your objective tightly defined, including quantity and time measures: to reduce the off-cut materials from production by 50% within 3 months.Go for volume in
Other common wastes include people moving around chasing information, documents looping back and forth where items are being clarified, interruptions etc.
The High Variation in Demand:
Services, particularly those dealing directly with customers generally face highly variable demand. Consider the case of hotel clerks checking in guests. There will be periods of low activity and at other times many guests will be in queue, waiting to be checked in. The situation is similar in a restaurant or shopping mall. The impact of such variation on WIP is significant.
The Relative Absence of Hard Data:
Service personnel are not accustomed to the same level of rigor in collecting and analysing data as their manufacturing counterparts.
Applying Lean Six Sigma to Improve Services
Define Improvement Targets on the Basis of VOC:
Use reactive and proactive means to listen to the voice of the customer.
Reactive methods are those where the customer takes the initiative through complaints, compliments, enquiries, web page hits, emails and the like. Reactive methods are good at detecting service weaknesses as customers will most likely contact you when they have problems.
Proactive methods are those where you take the initiative to gather customer information and include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups etc.
This information ensures that improvement targets you set are based on customer needs.
Make the Relevant Processes Visible:
The relevant processes target for improvement should be observed and mapped. This is not very easy to do, considering the nature of services. However with the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders and
If you're trying to grow your business, why would you turn away potential clients? In this article, you'll learn that as an IT specialist, your marketing efforts are less about turning away other clients and instead about finding if you have enough prospects to market to.If you know that your best clients are small accounting offices, do a quick search to find out how many small accounting offices there are in one hour radius of where you're located. If you don't know where to easily get your hands on that data, either contact one of that industry's leading trade groups, or talk with a mailing l
The Relative Absence of Hard Data:
Service personnel are not accustomed to the same level of rigor in collecting and analysing data as their manufacturing counterparts.
Applying Lean Six Sigma to Improve Services
Define Improvement Targets on the Basis of VOC:
Use reactive and proactive means to listen to the voice of the customer.
Reactive methods are those where the customer takes the initiative through complaints, compliments, enquiries, web page hits, emails and the like. Reactive methods are good at detecting service weaknesses as customers will most likely contact you when they have problems.
Proactive methods are those where you take the initiative to gather customer information and include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups etc.
This information ensures that improvement targets you set are based on customer needs.
Make the Relevant Processes Visible:
The relevant processes target for improvement should be observed and mapped. This is not very easy to do, considering the nature of services. However with the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders and
You’ve read about the importance of being courageous, rebellious and imaginative. These are all vital ingredients in an effective advertising campaign. However, they must be tempered with the most important ingredient of all—strategy.As long as the advertising industry has been in existence there has been debate about whether advertising is art or commerce. Quite frankly, this kind of divisive argument is a waste of time and has only helped to diminish what little respect the industry has earned through the years. Besides, the answer is simple. Advertising is the art of commerce.It can’t
Proactive methods are those where you take the initiative to gather customer information and include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups etc.
This information ensures that improvement targets you set are based on customer needs.
Make the Relevant Processes Visible:
The relevant processes target for improvement should be observed and mapped. This is not very easy to do, considering the nature of services. However with the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders and process operators, a lot can be achieved.
For each activity in the process, information required in creating the value stream map include estimated cost per activity, process time, queue time, change over time, demand rate, complexity (number of different services processed at the activity), uptime and defects/rework. This data should be collected based on at least one week of observation. The resulting map is known as a complexity value stream map.
Determine the Time Traps (to prioritise projects):
Using a complexity value stream mapping software, the activities which contribute most to non-value added time will be visible. These are the time traps. Following from the Pareto law, usually 80% of the non-value added time can be accounted for by 20% of the activities.
Analyse the Time Traps to Determine their Causes
A further output from the complexity value stream mapping software is the cost driver analysis. This specifies whether the source of the major time traps are primarily quality related, making them amenable to Six Sigma tools, operations related, which can be taken care of by Lean tools or complexity related which requires a streamlining or optimisation of the variety of service offerings.
Apply Appropriate Tools to Improve the Process:
The foregoing analysis having already pointed out the direction of improvement efforts, it is now left to apply lean methods to reduce setup time, reduce work in process or increase completion rates and six sigma methods to reduce the defects.
Huge opportunities translating to significant cost and time savings, along with quality improvements, exist in many service operations where typical process efficiencies are below 10% as against world class levels of 25-50%.
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