Bpo Inc Case
Synopsis
BPO, Inc. is a professional service organization that offers clients a range of services from risk management and insurance to management consulting. The company has grown and profited from the developing trend in the 90’s and 2000’s of companies outsourcing business processes, such as human resources and claims processing. Presently, BPO has launched a six sigma initiative to identify areas for process improvement and financial savings in the Human Resource Outsourcing department. Concurrently, one of BPO’s clients has shared frustrations with BPO’s services, is recommending an audit and threatening to leave BPO.
Define the problem faced by BPO.
BPO presently has a number of interrelated processes within the Health and Welfare Service Delivery department, specifically Database Update and Participant Care processes that remain separate and suffer from a great deal of process variance. Both departments work with the same clients (companies) and participants (employees), yet split processes, often increasing the amount of time and steps necessary to address customer issues – while decreasing customer satisfaction and increasing cost to BPO.
What are the appropriate measures (used in the context of measurement or metric) that should be taken to assess and improve the problem? Ethan and Jerry have launched a six sigma project and are on the right track in collecting baseline performance information on process time as well as variance in each of the Database Update and Participant Care processes. They have identified a number of key steps that show a considerable amount of variance (e.g. data loading processes, determining eligibility, reports, etc) in many processes as well as key issues in the sub-processes (e.g. priority on new calls over return calls, variance and costs added by participants being sent back and forth between staff). While they have spent a good amount of time “going to the place where the work is done,” they would benefit from
BPO, Inc. is a professional service organization that offers clients a range of services from risk management and insurance to management consulting. The company has grown and profited from the developing trend in the 90’s and 2000’s of companies outsourcing business processes, such as human resources and claims processing. Presently, BPO has launched a six sigma initiative to identify areas for process improvement and financial savings in the Human Resource Outsourcing department. Concurrently, one of BPO’s clients has shared frustrations with BPO’s services, is recommending an audit and threatening to leave BPO.
Define the problem faced by BPO.
BPO presently has a number of interrelated processes within the Health and Welfare Service Delivery department, specifically Database Update and Participant Care processes that remain separate and suffer from a great deal of process variance. Both departments work with the same clients (companies) and participants (employees), yet split processes, often increasing the amount of time and steps necessary to address customer issues – while decreasing customer satisfaction and increasing cost to BPO.
What are the appropriate measures (used in the context of measurement or metric) that should be taken to assess and improve the problem? Ethan and Jerry have launched a six sigma project and are on the right track in collecting baseline performance information on process time as well as variance in each of the Database Update and Participant Care processes. They have identified a number of key steps that show a considerable amount of variance (e.g. data loading processes, determining eligibility, reports, etc) in many processes as well as key issues in the sub-processes (e.g. priority on new calls over return calls, variance and costs added by participants being sent back and forth between staff). While they have spent a good amount of time “going to the place where the work is done,” they would benefit from