Lean in Services Case Study

Client Background

Recently we had the opportunity to work with a client that doesn’t make or move any material goods.  Impact Group does the important work of caring for families that are being relocated because of the jobs of one of the adults.  28 years ago, Laura Herring determined that companies focus completely on the employee they are moving so that their employee can “hit the ground running.”  Often what really adds stress to that employee is that their partner is struggling to adjust or find work, that their kids miss their friends and don’t fit in at their new schools, that they cannot find a good family doctor in their new city …. The list goes on.

Impact Group’s trained coaches and research team works to solve all the myriad of problems a relocating family can face.  Our founder’s family (Mitch Millstein and his Wife Susie) was supported by the Impact Group when his family moved to St. Louis 23 years ago!

Problem Description

Impact Group’s new VP of Client Services, Debbie Hilke, realized that although over 90% of their clients were satisfied with the great work her team does, there were opportunities for improvement.  Specifically, when a client did have an issue it took too long to resolve it.  She decided to use this quality process as the trigger to start Impact Group on their continuous improvement journey.  After speaking to several firms, Debbie and her team selected Supply Velocity to partner with them on that journey.  What Debbie liked about the Supply Velocity’s approach was that our goal is to teach our clients how to use the tools so they can be self-sufficient.

The Process of Process Improvement

With Cyril Narishkin as their facilitator, Debbie and her global team used Supply Velocity’s innovative process mapping tool to uncover the non-value added steps of the current state.  During mapping of the current state, the team also identified 62 “great ideas.”  Obviously, there is no way to implement that many ideas, so we went through a rigorous selection process to uncover which opportunities would give us the best return on investment.  Eleven projects were selected and a project manager was assigned to each. The outcome of these projects will be to add capacity with the same resources since the equivalent of 5-person-years of time was recovered due to the elimination of non-value added steps.

While analyzing survey data from customers, it became obvious that the team had never focused on root cause analysis.  The same issues seemed to rear their heads over and over.  Cyril took the opportunity to add teaching the team Cause and Effect analysis, the Pareto principle and how to ask the 5 Whys.  Solid corrective actions were identified for the two top Pareto causes of poor customer satisfaction.

At the report-out to Impact Group’s executive team, the consensus was that few people knew the frustration that was felt by other parts of the company.  The future state will pull everyone closer together as a team to better serve their clients.

To find out more about how Supply Velocity helped the Impact Group and can help your service business processes contact Cyril Narishkin (cyril@svnew.supplyvelocity.com).