Process Development Through LEAN in Finance Environment – Case Study
Should a service be substandard, it does not necessarily show right away, or at all. If the competition is not tight, the damages caused might not be considerable. Because of these circumstances, providers do not build an adequate measurement system to ensure quality of their service.
Unfortunately, this was the case for a long time in the financial services sector too. Policies and obligations embedded in law guides banks on how to handle complaining clients. Thanks to these balances, this is working great. Is it possible to work faster than given deadline, is it possible to work cheaper and yet still be abiding the law? Through the application of Lean approach, it is highly possible, and we’ll show how with this case study.
PROBLEM DEFINITION
The department is pulling a monthly report on many parameters on customer complaints. For us, the following items were important to start working with:
- description of complaint
- category of complaint
- justification of complaint
- root cause of complaint – according to the colleague handling it
It was clearly visible from the integrated results that the number of complaints was high, and there was no sign for a downward trend. Since the biggest value for any customer is prompt and direct communication concerning his problems, therefore we focused our attention on reducing client complaints.
The task was done through Lean concept process improvement. Complaint handling data was at hand, so were able to analyse and categorize failure categories. These categories were then prioritized and put through impact analysis, so a succession was scripted for them. Failure correction was then approached by the step-by-step Kaizen approach.
Since error rates were high, there was a need for a quick and high-quality correction. This did not allow us to run time and cost-consuming projects, therefore Lean was just ideal here.
DEFINITION OF PARTICIPANTS
Since Lean projects are characterized by cost reduction and cost minimalization, all tasks were transformed to be handled inside the organisation. Processes and their surrounding tasks were optimised. This required human task force coming from the professionals working in the respective areas.
Members of the so called ‘Lean Champion’ team worked in this project. They’ve included all stakeholder parties during the process.
CAUSE AND EFFECT ANALYSIS AND PRIORITIZING, FMEA
Lean Champions got to know the processes, they’ve found the sources of waste and complaint that ended up cumulating as client complaints. This way the list of failure codes, the so-called FMEA was collected.
The next step was the preparation of FMEA. This was done in a team. The task was to search for failure codes, and to add points representing the gravity of each code.
The failure codes were ranked into descending sequences and were grouped.
This was the preparation phase. It ended with action planning: the selected priorities were transformed into tasks and projects with exact deadlines.
EXECUTION, PREPARATION OF OPERATION
On a weekly basis, we analysed data on the projects defined with the project team members. We defined further steps, gathered highly needed top management support and hurdled through any possible obstacles.
From this point onwards, the development turned into a classical project management task. During the execution phase it was essential to have a stable and well-defined measurement and controlling system that guaranteed the continuous success after project execution.
We managed to reach a unified and simplified communication: it meant the extension of responsibilities, frequently recurring measurements, managing expectations and re-trainings of operators.
RESULTS
As a result of the development we managed to reduce the number of client complaints, as well as the workload of the client information department by 80%. The lead time was reduced from 4 weeks to 3 days. This development was a great success from the point of view of the company. While using less human resources, they managed to reach higher customer satisfaction and create cost-effective processes.
Outstanding results came: complete independent work of the operators was one of them. They’ve also managed to raise their scope of responsibilities concerning the decision making in their respective areas.
A side-effect of this development was the increase in customer satisfaction. Using a Lean approach, they managed to standardize and unify a customer-focused communication. It also meant high-quality information provision too. 89% of agents reported a more satisfied customer at the end of the line thanks to the new processes.
