Measure Phase

 

Project Name: Streamlining Customer Complaints Investigations

Problem Statement: The time to complete a complaint investigation needs to be shortened to accommodate for the frequency of complaints throughout the year to ensure timelines are met.

Moving onto the measure phase of this project, I utilized the following tools:

·         Brainstorming/ Voice of Customer

·         High Level Process Flowchart

·         Create data collection plan

·         Data collection

·         Value Stream mapping(current and future state)
 

I further developed the output from the brainstorming/ voice of the customer meetings during the define phase and transferred the affinity diagram into excel with the possible solutions detailed. During the brainstorming session, there were some ideas which were generated outside the scope of this project. During the team development meeting I had discussed what was outside the scope of this project, however, there are a number of areas which has been a struggle for some time, with some team members and therefore it naturally came up as a discussion point. However, these areas are corporate systems which would not be feasible for change in the timeframe of this project. I included these points for future reference and highlighted them in red for the team.  This was to indicate that these items will be reviewed for further development after this project.

The process flow chart developed during the define phase was transferred into visio to ensure that everyone was working off the same set of process steps. These process steps were grouped together under a number of high level headings as part of data collection.

In order to help determine the baseline for our current process, I developed a data collection plan that people could utilize over the space of two weeks where the complaint investigators and quality engineers would record the length of time it took to complete an investigation for a set number of complaints. This data collection plan helped to ensure that everyone was using the same method for collecting the data and a template was provided to that everyone would record the time per step in the same format. One of the requests for this data collection was to ensure that the device was returned as part of the investigation. Not all complaints have a device available for evaluation and therefore I wanted to ensure that the worst case scenario was timed for this project.

Given that no two complaints are the same in that they range in complexity depending on the device, what happened to the patient and the amount of information that is available to the investigator, an average time was calculated as the baseline for complaints. This will be reviewed further during the analyze phase.

With the results from the data collection, I was able to generate a value stream map for the current and future states. I have no experience with value stream mapping before so I had to complete quite a lot of research as to how to construct them. I used visio to construct the current and future value stream maps.

As highlighted also during the brainstorming session, it is not necessarily the complaint investigation process which takes up the time of the investigators but other tasks which feed into the 39 hour working week which take up time such as monthly, weekly reports, meetings and request for information from other departments. These tasks will also be reviewed as part of this project to ensure a more efficient process is developed for the team.

Assessment of Measure Phase: I found the measure phase tricky for some of the tools as I have no previous experience with them. However, as I mentioned in my introduction, this is the best method for me to learn is to execute through trial and error. The information pulled for this phase gave a much better picture of where we are compared to what I had estimated reviewing as a possible project last year.

 
Next Step: Analyze. Identify the cause of the problem.