Key Points

• Lean Six Sigma provides a structured means to reduce service delays.
• Customer feedback and process data drive improvements.
• Sustainable results come from integrating Lean Six Sigma into your organization’s culture.

Few things will send a customer to the competition faster than waiting. Whether it’s a client on hold with customer support, someone waiting on a delivery, or even a patient sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting represents one thing: inefficiency. The modern era is a fast-paced, high-tempo environment, and expectations are shaped by instant responses and same-day deliveries. Organizations that fail to rise to these challenges run the risk of losing customers and competitive standing.

Lean Six Sigma is a proven framework that excels at tackling such issues directly. By leveraging Lean’s focus on waste elimination with Six Sigma’s pursuit of consistency, organizations can readily identify the root causes of delays, streamline processes, and cut wait times drastically.

With that in mind, we’re looking at some key strategies utilizing Lean Six Sigma to help your organization transform slow, reactive operations into efficient, customer-first systems.

The Voice of the Customer

Before starting anything to revamp your service delays, it is important to take the time and listen to your customers. The Voice of the Customer, or VoC, defines what is going to be considered fast or timely, at least when considering how your customers are interacting with your services. A mechanic’s shop might consider short wait times to be an hour or so turnaround for routine maintenance, but a customer might consider a half hour more acceptable.

Customers might find longer waits more tolerable depending on the services provided. This is further augmented by communication, where clear expectations of what to expect can allow for longer wait times. Gathering VoC data can be handled through collating complaint logs, conducting customer surveys, or conducting user interviews. The use of affinity diagrams can help to identify recurring themes, helping you to identify Critical to Quality (CTQ) metrics. These metrics are going to be the foundation for your measurements and subsequent improvements.

Defining and Measuring the Current Process

The Define and Measure phases of DMAIC help to create the baseline for future improvement efforts. You can start by mapping the current process with a Value Stream Map to visualize each step, decision point, and handoff.

Just about any bottleneck is well hidden by the transitions between different stages of the work being done. It might be a handoff between departments where problems are arising. You’ll want to take the time to gather the cycle and queue time data for each step of a given process. Tools like a Pareto chart can identify where the most significant and frequent delays are occurring.

Getting to the Root of the Problem

Now that you’ve got a solid grasp of the process, you’re ready to start rectifying those service delays. A key part in moving toward improvement is understanding why these service delays are happening in the first place. As per the DMAIC cycle, we’re currently in Analyze, and making use of tools like the 5 Whys or cause-and-effect diagrams can be highly useful for determining what exactly is happening with a given process.

Eliminating Waste With Lean Thinking

Lean identifies eight types of waste: transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing, defects, and skills underutilization. For service delays, waiting and overprocessing are heavily damaging to the customer experience. You can target and rectify waste fairly quickly through the use of Kaizen events. You could streamline workflows to allow for parallel processing instead of sequential reviews.

You could also take the time to introduce visual management tools like Kanban boards to track current work-in-progress items. Kanban boards are highly useful for limiting the amount of coal in a given fire and preventing vital items from getting lost in queues or other well-meaning planning.

Improving Flow with Workload Balancing and Standardization

Variation in workflow will lead to service delays over time. A team might process 40 requests a day normally, while another team struggles to complete 10. This isn’t because of a lack of effort or training, but inconsistency in managing workflow. Standardization can readily help with this inconsistency, setting identified best practices for each task of a workflow can see the workload achieve balance, and the disparity between requests is equalized.

Leveraging Technology

Technology is a driving force behind any modern business looking to stay competitive. Automation can greatly help reduce service delays. That said, you’ll want to make sure your processes are improved, as we’ve detailed in the previous talking points. An automated, inefficient process simply elevates that inefficiency. Digital tools like robotic process automation and workflow management systems can help handle the tedious elements of your daily operations.

When combined with a Lean Six Sigma dashboard, you can help sustain improvements and see any areas of concern that might need adjustments in the future.

Control and Maintain

Continuous improvement is useless if you’re just going to backslide on those gains after a few months. As you pivot into the Control phase of DMAIC, you’ll want to develop some systems to help maintain the current status quo of your revamped processes. Control charts can help to set upper and lower limits to readily detect variation early.

Ongoing training should be a constant fixture for your workforce, helping to develop lasting skills that help to better serve your customers. Without the right precautions and systems, you’ll eventually fall right into the old familiar habits with service delays.

Building a Lasting Culture

Lean Six Sigma isn’t a trendy project, or a buzzword for that matter. It is a philosophy, a mindset, and a core aspect of how some organizations function. Reducing those service delays only treats one aspect of your organization’s operations. You can extend that to the whole organization by building a lasting culture centered around continuous improvement.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to start the work week off right? You might want to take a closer look at how BPR can help cut through the fat and get right to the performance that matters with over-engineered processes. Over time, processes can get bloated and well out of spec. BPR lets you start fresh and build a better, faster process.

You might also want to take a closer look at how Lean thinking can transform operations in healthcare. We touched on Lean thinking briefly today, but getting used to the logic can help see a transformation take place in any organization.

Conclusion

Service delays aren’t just wasted time, but damage to your brand. Lean Six Sigma provides a proven roadmap to identify and eliminate the causes of these delays. By implementing and leveraging its teachings at your organization, you’re looking to transform and sustain lagging processes for the better.