Written by 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.
Quarterly reports were taking Tehseen 16 days, a process seen as taking too long. She listened to her customers and completed a Voice of Customer Translation Matrix. It helped her identify and formulate a clear goal:Â Reduce Quarterly Report Lead Time to less than 5 business days.
Tehseen discovered that her process was filled with non-value adding steps by using a Value Stream Map . She was investing a lot of her time creating detailed analysis that wasn’t important to her customer.
Using a Histogram and Box Plots, she found that the average cycle time for her report was 16 days.
She used a Fishbone Diagram to determine what was slowing down her process:
- Unnecessary analysis
- Redundancies
- Interruptions
- Competing priorities
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 implementing improvements, the Quarterly Report Cycle Time dropped from 16 days to only 4.5 days, and work time decreased from 5 hours to 1.3 hours.
Watch the 30 minute video, or read the transcript at https://goleansixsigma.com/success-story-lightning-reporting-reducing-report-lead-time-16-4-5-days/