transactional processes
“When placed in command, take charge.”
— Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.
A Wise Man Once Said…
“The biggest difference between manufacturing Lean Six Sigma and transactional Lean Six Sigma is that when dealing with manufacturing, one can see the product moving through the process due to the fact that an engineer probably designed it that way. But with a transactional process, the product frequently is electronic in nature as a service provided, so it is much more difficult to visualize the WIP, waste or variation.”
What’s The Challenge?
A challenge often facing the transactional environment are measurements that highlight incomplete job responsibilities and lack of process measures.
Case in point: when asking a manufacturing manager how many associates he or she needs to complete a product, they will immediately know the answer due to almost everything within the factory being measured and a cost associated beforehand.
But ask an office manager that same question, and most likely they will not have a response ready.
Why is this? Let’s look at our manufacturing example. There are 3 things that a plant manager must know in order to calculate the number of associates needed to complete product “A”.
- The daily product A production volume or demand.
- The amount of time each task takes to complete product A.
- The daily amount of time available for the associate to perform all tasks required.
What’s The Result?
Let’s now compare this to the transactional environment.
- It is very rare for an office manager to know the volume or demand requirement for the day. This is relevant to invoices, customer service calls, IT outages, invoice disputes, or any other office tasks.
- The majority of office managers do not have a standard or time & motion study to calculate the amount of time each task takes to complete.
- This is the one thing they do know. But without the other two, they can only guess as to how many associates they need to process the amount of work coming in to the department.
Now to be fair; the office environment is more challenging due to the measurement deficiencies stated above. But using SBTI’s seasoned transaction advisory techniques, the journey of identifying and measuring the missing deficiencies with the ultimate goal of increasing process performance is a less complex affair.
How Can We Help?
SBTI helps our clients identify and then eliminate this waste and variation using transaction consulting techniques. Like the wise person’s statement, one has to use techniques and tools to highlight where the waste and variation is hiding.
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