Success Stories for Lean in the Manufacturing

 

 

Success Stories in the Services Sector

Success Story 1: Driving up Call Centre Performance Worldwide

Lack of responsiveness across more than 20 Call Centres globally was impacting customer satisfaction. A global initiative to drive up performance was established with a focus on reducing average call resolution time while simultaneously increasing first time right rates. By reducing non-value adding activities, increasing effectiveness of Call Centre staff and balancing workloads within and across Call Centres, performance improved significantly. The result was an improvement in average call resolution times and a reduction in worldwide backlogs, both by 75%.

Success Story 2: Cutting the queues at the front-lines

The client organisation was not meeting minimum service level expectations in parts of their operation. The result was long queues during busy periods in these parts of their operations, causing customer unhappiness. The staff that was rotated into these customer service operations did not always have sufficient job knowledge and skills. Other waste and bottlenecks in the system were identified and removed. A strategy to discover customers with exceptional situations and to isolate them was implemented. The result was that queue time and queue lengths were more than halved and service levels were more than adequately met

Success Story 3: Improving productivity of Material Handlers

The clients picking and packing operations required employees to walk long distances and to many store locations which were distributed throughout their facility. Waste associated with distances and searching for items repeatedly meant that more staff were required and often also resulted in the need for overtime work. The stores were reorganized and savings amounted to $250k per year.

Success Story 4: Leaner Software Development and Maintenance

The quality of software, the long time to have software problems fixed, and patches which created even more problems at customer sites impacted customer satisfaction significantly. Steps were taken to emphasize the need for quality at source for the software and for patches that were released to customers. Specific problem areas in the software were identified and attacked. Extreme programming concepts were applied for support and maintenance of the software where experts from several areas were simultaneously deployed to fix complex issues.