Quick Glance Case Study: Proactive Product Fix

“The new Lean process is highly effective in increasing proactive product replacements, generating a more efficient completion, and creating significant cost savings”

After completing a ChangeWise Lean Practitioner training course, one candidate submitted the following work-place project to gain their qualification to LCS Level 1c.

The Business Challenge

The business was experiencing high levels of customer contact and dissatisfaction due to a product issue. Failure as a result of wear and tear for this type of product was acceptable within the industry, but the process for resolving and fixing was inefficient, expensive to the business and extremely frustrating for the customer.

An end-to-end Lean review was completed to look at how we could adapt or change the current process in order to replace the product proactively.

Photo by Call Me Fred on Unsplash

Key people involved from client site

Filed Technicians and members of the Senior Leadership Team.

Lean Methodology Employed

DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analise, Improve, Control)

The candidate completed a full Lean review of the end-to-end current state process.

Various Lean methodologies were employed including, SIPOC, Value Stream Mapping, Value and Non-Value Add Analysis and Fishbone Diagrams.

Key Current State Findings 

In the current state process, defective customer products were only replaced once identified and reported to the business by the customer, these would then be repaired by our field teams on a reactive basis.

To better understand where non-value add processing took place, and to gather data to determine a baseline of how many product replacements were carried out across the areas, the current state process was mapped out. This enabled us to understand the size of the opportunity, and look at which areas could be most impacted by replacing products proactively.

Options for how to approach the proactive product replacement process were discussed, and a list of options examined in more detail.

The best option was collectively agreed, and a fishbone diagram produced to identify all criteria for consideration in the future state process.

Benefits and Outcomes

A work instruction was created which outlined the responsibilities of each person within the process. It also outlined the purpose and scope for the new process. This was circulated to everyone who would be affected or need to know about the change.

A proactive process will enable:

• Reduction in travel time and cost of travel
• Reduction in the amount and therefore cost of permits
• Reduction in traffic management and associated costs as field teams travel to sites to fix products
• Reduction in inbound customer calls and complaints

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

In Summary

The new Lean process is highly effective in increasing proactive product replacements and generating efficiencies. The benefits were realised once the first 41 jobs had been completed using the proactive approach; these were completed in 9 deployments instead of 41 deployments – and so generated a more efficient completion, creating significant cost savings.

Interested in looking at how a more proactive approach to product issues could help save your business time and money? Contact us at info@changewise.co.uk and let’s talk about how we can help.

ChangeWise believes employee engagement is the foundation for successful Change. Training and coaching your people to use simple continuous improvement techniques will enable your organisation to continuously adapt and stay ahead in a constantly changing and challenging environment.

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