UC San Diego Reduces Report Lead Time By 72% With GLSS
Florida
Healthcare
Patient Care
350%
Tehseen Lazzouni is a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and Financial Analyst in the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at UC San Diego, one of the world’s leading public research universities. Through DMAIC, Tehseen was able to identify and remove redundancies, streamline her process, and reduce interruptions to the process – reducing Report Lead Time from 16 to 4.5 Days!
THE CHALLENGE
Quarterly reports were taking Tehseen 16 days, a process seen as taking too long.
During her Green Belt Training & Certification, Tehseen knew this painful process was the perfect project to test her new Lean Six Sigma skills and save her team precious time and resources.
How did she accomplish this awesome feat? With DMAIC of course!
By listening to her customer and completing a Voice of Customer Translation Matrix, Tehseen was able to identify the painful points of her process and formulate a clear goal: reduce Quarterly Report Lead Time to less than 5 business days.
THE DISCOVERY
Using a Value Stream Map to create a detailed step-by-step view of her process, Tehseen discovered that her process was filled with non-value adding steps. She found that she was investing a lot of her time creating detailed analysis that wasn’t that important to her customer.
She then compiled all the data from past reports to create a Histogram and Box Plots. This allowed her to find that the average cycle time for her report was 16 days – yikes!
By using a Fishbone Diagram to brainstorm and identify the most likely root causes, and performing a value-added flow analysis, she was able to determine what was slowing down her process:
- Unnecessary analysis
- Redundancies
- Interruptions
- Competing priorities
Tehseen was able to see for herself that her first hypotheses about what was slowing down her process was wrong.
That’s a lesson I learned on my very first day of class… Lean Six Sigma is stepping back and taking the time to analyze [the process].
THE IMPROVEMENTS
After streamlining the report, removing redundancies and interruptions, and targeting two to three reports per day, Tehseen was able to decrease the wait time between reports.
Some of her implemented solutions were to:
- Remove unnecessary analysis
- Contact Directors prior to running reports to get early projections
After her improvements, Tehseen saw her Quarterly Report Cycle Time drop from 16 days to only 4.5 days, and her work time decreased from 5 hours to 1.3 hours!
When reflecting upon her experience, she said, “overall, this was a really positive project. I enjoyed working on it. My department management loved the new streamline reports and we’ve already implemented them for all of our facilities.”
We then asked Tehseen, “Do you have any advice for someone that’s going to be embarking on a Green Belt project?”
She made us swell with pride when she said:
Take the time to understand the problem and not jump to conclusions. Let’s go through the process. This has been developed for a reason. And it allows you to see so much more than if you had already decided what your improvement was going to be.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Tehseen is taking her Lean Six Sigma skills to the next level by joining the Community of Practice for Process Improvement at UC San Diego as well as the Enterprise System Renewal process team. With one project under her belt, Tehseen can now add value to any process she sets her sights on!
