BPO, INC. is a professional services organization that offers its clients a range of services from risk management/insurance brokerage to management consulting. The EBO is one of BPO’s fastest-growing businesses. Although its revenues have been growing 30% annually, the division has had a big loss. And its business is at risk due to its poor customer service. So the Executive Vice President wants an immediate update on the ongoing Six Sigma project to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Health and Welfare Service Delivery Process.
EBO’s operation is inefficient and ineffective, negatively impacting the profitability and service levels of the Health and Welfare Service Delivery Process. First, the Database Update Sub-Process and the Participant Care Sub-Process are highly interrelated with each other in processes, so they often have to increase steps to address customer issues. These non-value adding steps just increase the variances of processes and decrease customer satisfaction. Second, the unreasonable schedule doesn’t match the timeline of service demand, leading to low utilization of employees. Third, BAs’ and CSRs’ improper operations result in the delay of callbacks.
BPO launched a six sigma project to obtain the result of baseline performance metrics and the data of variances in processes. They also draw a process map to try to find the bottlenecks of the operational processes and to solve problems. In order to develop an accurate and detailed process map, Jerry directly interviewed people who were familiar with various parts of the process.
The Database Update process had too many steps, the more steps, the larger chances of increasing variances. For Participant Care process, most CSRs’ shifts were end before 6:00pm. Just two were end at 8:00pm. However, after 6:00 pm each hour had over 10 calls. It was difficult for just two CSRs to handle all calls. Moreover, CSRs often had to escalate some issues to BAs and then replied