Written by Alex Ogunji is a Master Black Belt with the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder Clerk. To address financial variances between two different payment systems, and to reduce the time to reconcile the variances, he organized a cross-functional team across the three bureaus to create a Swimlane Map which would capture the whole payment process end-to-end.
The activity uncovered a glitch in the online ordering process that caused certain orders not to appear in their payment systems.
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.
Finally, 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.
Here are the results:
- 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
Watch the video of the project summary here, or the embedded video below…