LA County Reduces Payment Processing Errors By 88% With GLSS
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Alex Ogunji is a Master Black Belt and Lean Six Sigma Program Coordinator at the LA County Registrar Recorder County Clerk. Their office trains individuals all over the county in Lean Six Sigma methods and tools to reduce errors and save on costs.
THE CHALLENGE
While reviewing complaints, Alex discovered that three different bureaus in his department had the same complaint: too much variance and too much time taken to reconcile the variance.
Variance is a cash balance discrepancy that can occur between the County Clerkâs two different payment systems. It was causing long delays for customers and creating an extremely painful process for employees. Alex decided to create a cross-functional team across the three bureaus to create a Swimlane Map which would capture the whole payment process end-to-end.
THE DISCOVERY
After mapping the process, the team discovered the opportunities for improvement.
The IT department discovered a root cause: There was a glitch in the online ordering process that caused certain orders not to appear in their payment systems. Adding to this, cashiers and supervisors had different methods of using the payment systems, further complicating the initial issue.
Finding and fixing a discrepancy took 3 hours on average! Their solution? Attack the problem on three fronts.
THE IMPROVEMENTS
First, the team developed a better way to process variance and streamlined the reconciliation process. The team also addressed three major root cause instances that would cause the discrepancy and eliminated those from happening. Then the IT team trained all cashiers and supervisors on the new process and how to properly use the payment system. This created Standard Work and helped to reduce the variance and the lead time.
Lastly, the IT team fixed their web orders by making a simple request of their payment vendor to purge all incomplete orders after 90 days, easily correcting their glitch.
The results were amazing:
- Variances decreased from 8 to 1 discrepancies per month
- Discrepancies were found in just 10 minutes instead of 3 hours, saving them almost 900 hours of labor a year
All said and done, these DMAIC projects only took about 4 months to complete.
"The benefits were amazing. Time reduction was amazing. It was three hours before. With the improvement, it became 10 minutes to search for variance, 10 minutes!â - Alex Ogunji
We asked Alex what advice he would give to a Green Belt, and he said, âactually sit down with folks in other areas and begin a conversation to discover the process together… I would say get your champions involved early and really go talk to your process partners upstream and downstream.â
Alex and his team discovered the power of collaboration! When battling cross-departmental issues, walking the process and communication becomes essential to finding and fixing root causes. We canât wait to see what problems his department will tackle next!