CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
 DRIVING PROCESS EXCELLENCE

WHAT IS PROCESS EXCELLENCE?

SAMPLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • Identifying product validation as Motorola’s bottleneck in new product development, radically revised testing for a 75% reduction in throughput time and a 300% increase in issue detection. This reduced new product time-to-market by 2.5 months, slashed field failure rates and warranty costs in half, and nearly eliminated costly post-ship engineering changes. This test was institutionalized corporate-wide for an overall impact exceeding $1 billion.
  • Identifying that engineering design reviews of new products were occuring too late in the development process and that new engineers were repeating the mistakes of the past because there was no institution memory, created an upstream concept review process with 35 technical Centers of Excellence. Each CoE was headed by an experienced engineer in that field, along with 2-4 junior engineers that they mentored. All 35 CoE captains would review the proposed concept approach and identify key issues, scoring them by likelihood and severity.  They also assessed program risks based on the approach, staffing, and deadline. Each CoE team would then meet with the design team in brief meetings to address the identified issues. This process increased reliability and reduced product time-to-market by an additional 2 months. This process was replicated at multiple Motorola sites, creating a Corporate Technology Network that leveraged resources, promoted collaboration, mentored new engineers and expedited technology transfer for an impact of over $300 million.
  • Created a transactional control reporting system at Ocwen Financial that, in less than 1 year, improved execution from 65% of projects missing over 50% of their targets to 78% of projects making 100% of their targets for an impact of over $60 million. This online report became the de facto corporate scorecard with drilldown capabilities.
  • Identifying that 71% of Johnson & Johnson's production of portable insulin infusion pumps was for free warranty replacements, conducted study of the warranty return process and created fault tree driven call center scripts for the top 8 causes of warranty returns for a 33% reduction in replacements and over $5 million in benefits.
  • Identifying that the Real Estate/Financial Industry was using the antiquated metric of "Resolution Rate" (based on properties sold in a month from a total portfolio), changed performance measurement to "Acquisition to Sale Rate" (based on time to sell properties from month of acquisition). Where "Resolution Rate" only reflected external issues impacting sales, the "Acquisition to Sale Rate" metric accurately reflected the impact of the internal process changes.  Using this metric, the effectiveness of the process changes were validated resulting in an impact of over $5 million. For additional information regarding this, see the Data Mining tab and ASQ World Conference Presentation.
  • Led Innovation Boot Camps to consolidate and redesign call center collection, debit and fraud operations across Verizon’s 4 different financial lines of business (Wireless, Wireline/FiOS, Enterprise, and Wholesale). Although we were successful in achieving agreements across all lines of business, we had difficulty in obtaining scarce internal IT resources. To resolve that obstacle, we turned externally to OpenSpan desktop Robotic Process Automation software.

Lloyd Consulting Group Inc. is a member of PEX

With the many Process Excellence methodologies available, it can be a bit confusing to determine which one (or combination) that you need for your corporate challenges.
 
The following are provided to show a high-level comparison:
  • Business Process Transformation is a larger scale effort that aligns strategic goals with needed process and organization redesign
  • Lean focuses on eliminating waste for faster, less costly operations
  • Six Sigma improves process capabilities to reduce variation & defects
  • Shainin System supports direct problem solving by front line workers
  • Design for Six Sigma seeks to proactively design quality & reliability
  • Agile uses rapid, iterative delivery of prioritized features for feedback