LinkedIn

View Rajesh Mohandas's profile on LinkedIn

Friday, February 21, 2014

Going beyond the orthodox approach… for a $ 100 million savings


If you're after big goals, you don't want to settle for the ordinary, extreme success is by definition outside the realm of normal ways of doing things and so I decided to propose something different to accomplish the set goals…I started a dream journey on a $ 100 Million savings for the organization to accomplish the bigger Vision set by the management and solve the problems it encounters during this Mission using tools and frameworks like Lean Six Sigma, TRIZ, CAP, Theory of Constraints etc…
 It’s impossible to get the exact reasons why people fail and others succeed knowing the exact formula to solve problems would have been an awesome state to be in but in vain, we are all human and very unique… so are the problems we encounter are unique in nature…
The organization has hired a set of Black Belts and Master Black Belts and the team is scattered across the organization hunting for small and big projects … a pipeline of ideas from various corners and a DNA building … and so on and so on… not everyone is Jack Welch and not every organization that picks up the journey of Lean Six Sigma has accomplished the monitory results and benefits to the extent they plan for… the challenge for this fiscal year is a big one… savings to a tune of $ 100 Million and will be quite an interesting journey to get this outcome.
While we talk about change and transformation, I did something different…, out of box… and proposed the following model to accomplish the desired benefit compared to the traditional approach where the BB / GB is the only person doing all the things the project requires…
In my approach the phases of a typical projects will be broken such that the team will not be only of MBBs and BBs and they will not be playing the role of a Mentor in getting the GBs do the projects… if at all they do it will be limited to a set of few early and less experienced folks spending time on building the momentum and training GBs and mentoring them on small projects very much in their scope and control… and the rest of the folks will move into a stronger approach to tackle the issue and embrace a factory model…
We will have one team called the IDEATION team who will be responsible to generate and gather ideas from various ends of the organization, this team will be playing a typical presales / marketing kind of role involved in researching industry best practices, building case studies, running champions workshops, conducting trainings, using organization wide tools to generate ideas, talking with people at CxO level and identifying opportunities for improvement.
The second team will predominantly work and focus only on the Define Phase of the project; this team will be assigned ideas from the Ideation team and will connect with the person generating the idea and facilitate the discussion with the people who are the owners of the function… for example if an idea is to reduce energy consumption across the organization this team will facilitate the discussion with the engineering and maintenance team to take it fwd. This Define Team will also be responsible in building the project charter, defining the business case, drawing the problem statement, benchmarking the current levels and  setting the goals in discussion with the champion and key stakeholder, planning, budgeting, initial communications, spending time with the subject matter experts gathering an understanding of the process and draw the as is process maps.
The Third team will be the data analysis team, this team will get the inputs from the Define team and start working on the measures, draw a data collection plan looking at the process and sub processes, perform the Gage R & R studies, get the measurement system right, set the operational definitions in place and perform all the functions of the measure phase, the very important role and function of this team will be to ensure data accuracy and data completeness, prepare the raw data on a spread sheet and draw the initial cuts with some pivots and slice and dice to represent various views of the data as per the data plan.
The inputs form the Team 2 (Define Team) and Team 3 (Measure Team) will flow into the Analysis team, this team will be responsible to come up with inferences post analysing the process and datasets using tools like Minitab and various other analysis tools that the Six Sigma framework offer, this team will liaison with the business leaders, function leaders and all other teams as and when necessary to come up with the inferences based on the analysis.
The final team … or what I call as the real change agents, the momentum builders, the go getters the core execution team will be the one who will use this data, inferences and all the hard work done by the others and play a true consulting role with the function and business leaders in shaping the change and meet the desired outcome. The brainstorming’s, POCs, Pilots, liaising with the internal IT team for rising the change request and building the systems cementing the structures and all other improvement activities. Post implementation this team will also work with the finance to help showcase the savings and benefits to the organization from the improvement project.

No comments:

Post a Comment