B2BiQ

From Allied Irish Banks, Head of Process Improvement and Customer Services Lorraine Duffy joins us to take us through the two-and-a-half year brand reinvention of everything from the operations manufacturing side through customer services with an ambition to support and serve customers digitally. The output was going from having 90 different ways to measure work, settling on one language. From there Lorraine and the team set sights on buckets of processes for automation. She shares that heavy training and development, a lean network and a reliance on change agents were the keys to success.

Paul Bartley joins us and gives us three things GBS executives should be doing right now. Number one is to access complete data to ensure you can accurately measure progress from your control. Number two is to remember that no matter the technology, change management is more important than the technology. And three is to keep innovating. And on innovation, branding your group goes a long way.

A true roundtable discussion of six sigma in AIIA. A few key quotes:

"Very early stages, we tried to roll out Kaizen ahead of the robotics piece, so there were two separate things that then we pulled together. The biggest challenge is getting peoples' time. So, trying to do the sales pitch to very resource squeezed operational areas, say "Give me your people to come in and talk to me about prices improvement," and drive their own prices improvement rather than answer a phone call when we're under immense pressure. That is the main challenge, so embedding it is the kicker."

"I have a Six Sigma background, but at the moment, we're working to embed that within the organization I'm in, and also work at embedding RPA as well, so we've embedded RPA for probably about the last 18 months, so we're doing a bit of backtrack in terms of we've done some RPA stuff, now let's put some Lean and CI side of it in, and how do we make sure that we're not automating rubbish."

"It's amazing. We've got so much sponsorship it's incredible. What we don't have is all the peripheral processes that are needed, Lean enough, to actually go."

"If you're going to put in a rapid or a streamlined development, it's going to cost you between 30 and 50 thousand pounds. You need two people straight away. When you got 350 processes or 340 processes, it makes it harder, so you're naturally, you think you got 340 processes to go after, but when look at all of the transformational road maps that are going on and already looking at driving out opportunities and value, it makes it really hard to go after certain things."

"What you should be looking to do is standardize your processes, digitize them where you can, put your continuous improvement lens on it, and then we'll automate what's left. The people who are going, while they're under significant cross-challenges, they're going straight to the automate the hell out of my process."

The GM of Commercial GE Operations, Chris Bevacqua joins us and shares that originally he was a sales guy who was asking a lot of questions about shared services. So many in fact, that he was put in charge. From there he dove in on intelligent automation. Realizing that a client was on-boarded over 400 times, he and the team chose on-boarding for a first project. They automated 80% of process saving FTE’s who have been up-skilled to high-end triage. Mark him down for not only cutting cost but adding value to the organization as well as the customer.

Mark Beaumont, record-breaking cyclist who peddled his way around the world in less than 80 days joins us to discuss perseverance- among other things. He notes in passing, early on in the conversation that he had broken bones for most of the trip. But his focus in the interview- as it was then- was to accomplish the ultimate goal. And the ultimate goal was accomplished by achieving the daily goal every day. His focus was on cycling an average of 240 miles each day. He shattered his original record by 44 days, meaning the ultimate goal wasn't about beating the number- it was optimizing his human output.

On change management, Lee Coulter returns, "over the last couple of years, we have been making a real study of where is the barrier and where are we receiving passive-aggressive behavior as opposed to outright rejection behavior. What should not be a surprise or fascinating, but is both surprising and fascinating is all the basic tenets of change management, guess what? They apply here.

Shell’s Global Head of CI Downstream, Michael Van Noort joins us and shares that his key focuses are the overall business goals and determining if his team is connected to those priorities. He ensures his team is helping the business better meet the consumer’s needs in a safe way while ensuring that CI is streamlined to those goals as opposed to being a goal in and of itself. That approach has “cemented” credibility with senior leaders because CI and Excellence are tied to efforts around what matters most to the organization, KPIs, etc. And so, Michiel has embedded operational excellence into the culture, with an 'everybody, every day’ focus. CI is informing the organization of opportunities while maintaining critical mass ensuring a 'continuity of the journey.'

Sebastian Antony joins us and shares that he and the organization look at process through a customer lens. He notes that if you say you’re customer-centric, that’s all well and good, but you’ve got to prove it in your actions. Way back when he started in six sigma for Barclay’s he was a team of one. He realized that there was a desire in the company to do something about efficiency and continuous improvement and he ran with it. He began by simply observing processes, creating relationships and in four to six months he knew the business operations and how to build operational excellence within the inherent structure.