Six Sigma in Planning v1.0 - The Forumplanningforum.co.uk/Portals/0/presentations/seminars/101014/Six...Oct 15, 2010 · AVIVA UKGI: Using Six Sigma in our Planning ... CTQ Tree Critical

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AVIVA UKGI: Using Six Sigma in our Planning

Professional Planning Forum

National Back Office Best Practice Seminar

14th October 2010

Adrian Hawes – Resource Optimisation Manager


Who are Aviva?

Aviva Worldwide

46,000 people, 53 million customers in 28markets…

Who are UK General Insurance?

Approximately 11,000 operations FTE spreadacross a number of locations in the UK and India

Responsibilities range from sales, servicing,collecting money and settling claims

Aiming to deliver piece of mind for the customer

Handle 20 million calls, 3.5 million renewals, andpaying £3.5 billion in claims

Also managing suppliers and providing technicalexpertise to support Aviva’s personal andcommercial insurance business

Essentially a large, multi-site operation – on and offshore

Partly virtual, partly ring-fenced – driven by strategy, customer ownership, skill and complexity,


Our Resource Optimisation Legacy

• Call Centre planning and optimisation established andadequate

• Back office/blended office planning/optimisation largely non-existent

• Top down (Finance driven) budget was “king”

• Lack of flex in resourcing to support volatile customerdemand and seasonality in back/blended office

• Extremely reactive approach

• No consistent approach to planning and optimisation

• Planning Team frustrated, under-valued…..banging headsagainst the wall but persevering

We thought we knew our problem…..

….we’d tried and tried and tried to fix it……

We patently needed a new approach and/or a new understanding


The Catalyst for Six Sigma?

• Must do something different!

• Continuous Improvement and Six Sigma becoming “buzz –words” relating to processimprovement within the Operations

• New Director on the Board specialising in Continuous Improvement techniques

• Opportunity to leverage this shift in thinking, apply it to planning…and get a new champion on theboard

BUT

• Where to start?

• Six Sigma is a big beast……

“Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputsby identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors)and minimizing variability in manufacturing and businessprocesses”


DMAIC – Core to our New Approach

The DMAIC project methodology has five phases:

Define the problem, the voice of the customer and theproject goals.

Measure key aspects of the current process and collectrelevant data.

Analyse the data to investigate and verify cause-and-effect relationships.

Improve the current process based upon data analysis

Control the future state process to ensure that anydeviations from target are corrected before they result indefects.


But this is our (insular?)view…we need to get tothe crux & detail of the

challenge with ourcustomers

How is this new?

• Principally this is about planners using a new project methodology & approach

• Initially to gain board acceptance for our proposition

• Our initial Project Charter…

Programme objectives

Deliver a solution across UKGI that supports eachbusiness as well as the following:

Problem Statement

We are not optimising our resources so we’respending money we don’t need to

No common view of what “resourceoptimisation” is across the whole of UKGI

Lack of confidence in the outputs of theexisting processes

Enable understanding of the true impact offinancial decisions

Optimisation strategies which work for thepeople and the business

Enabler for decision making based on fact notintuition

Establish the best practice model and supportpost programme completion


Voice of the Customer (and controlling the scope…)

Focused on:

• Critical business outcomes

• How RO needs to support

• Issues with current RO propositions

• What “great” would look like

Questionnaires and interviews with our customers, planning teams across Aviva, externalorganisations and the PPF…

NOT Focused on:

• RO solutions

• Tweaks to current process

• Technology requirements

• Personalities and emotion


Voice of the Customer Feedback

Helping us to Define our Problem…in detail

“We don’t understand the full, operational implications ofour financial decisions or the financial implications of our

operational decisions”

“We don’t differentiate our approach betweenhigh and low volume or specialist and bulk

processing business units”

“There is a lack of confidence in the outputs of theprocess”

Our process is not responsive enough to supportdynamic operational decision making”

“…lacking in proactive challenge – not driving thedecisions we need to make”

“What does “optimised” mean?”

“Resource is not utilised to best effect”

“We are not managing our people well enough”

Was this a surprise to us?...not entirely, but the insight this gave us went beyond our previouslevel of understanding


Voice of the Customer Feedback

Helping us to Define What Good/Great Looks Like…in more detail

Confidence to make decisions based on RO outputs –delivered at speed

No surprises – knowing the operational implications ofany decisions we take

Full governance, ownership and accountability for allinputs, outputs and assumptions

Optimal resourcing through seasonal cycles andexceptional events

Managers focused on managing their people

Greater flexibility in our overall pool of resource

Accurate predictions of FTE and costs to deliver desiredlevel of service and indemnity spend

Budgets underpinned by capacity plans

Actually, nothing too mind-boggling here…relatively simple set of outcomes here that form thebasis for what we have to deliver


Defining Success…Tangibly…CTQ Tree

Critical to Quality (CTQ) tree

Identifying the customer’s key objectives and theirunderlying needs.

Aligning the solutions and defining themeasurements of success.

NeedNeed

MeasurementMeasurement

NeedNeed


NeedNeed


NeedNeed


ObjectivesObjectives

Optimal utilisation of staff to deliver goodservice

Working patterns that give staff anappropriate work/life balance & are fit for the

business

Absence, Attrition, Staff Survey andPerformance targets achieved.KPIs delivered to expectations

Line balancing/annualised hours embedded.Skills in place to deliver planned volume and

mix.

Key to the success of the programme…

• These “needs” and “measures” become the backdropto every delivery

• Focuses the mind even more clearly on the desiredoutcomes…and in a more tangible sense

• Clearly, as a Planning Team, we need a further set ofKPIs/measures to help us understand how we deliveragainst these

• Frequently re-visited – particularly when times weretough!!


Current Process - SIPOC

Understanding the planning processesthough SIPOCs so that they work togetherand complete the lifecycle.

Supplier – the source of information

Inputs – the information supplied

Process – how the information is used

Outputs – what the information becomes

Customers – who uses the outputs

Enables understanding of …

• the full process lifecycle

• how to connect the different elements of the process

• risks to the process

• where “defects” or disconnects occur (or are likely to occur)

• what a great process should look like

Provided a great mechanism to get our Planning Team fully engaged


Gaining the Mandate and Sustaining the Buy-in

Outcomes

NeedNeed


NeedNeed


NeedNeed


NeedNeed



A robust platform to design,develop and implement our

RO solutions….

…based on provenmethodologies and tools….

…with a control mechanism tomonitor and measure success…and

to revisit over the long term

...and clarity of the risks, defects andopportunities in our RO processes

…with genuine “voice of thecustomer” needs & outcomes

understood…

CLEAR DIRECTION &OBJECTIVES

...engaging our process improvementpeople in the business


…and it continues today

NeedNeed


NeedNeed


NeedNeed


NeedNeed



Our CTQs are as relevant today asthey were at outset…and we regularly

revisit them

Outcomes

Our governance framework isstrongly focused on

continuous “voice of thecustomer” feedback

We continue to evolve our processesas we implement in to more of our

Centres of Excellence – and apply ourlearning to previous roll-outs

We’ve used different data manipulationand presentation techniques in ournew models and work measurement

initiatives

CO-Post

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

0:00:00 0:30:00 1:00:00 1:30:00 2:00:00 2:30:00 3:00:00

CO1 CO2 CO30:00:00

0:02:53

0:05:46

0:08:38

0:11:31

0:14:24

0:17:17

0:20:10

CO1 CO2 CO3

ContinuousImprovement nowfully engaged with

planning processes


The Aviva “Top Tips”

Recognised industry tools can give greater credibility to your programme with your seniorcustomers

Truly understanding your customer’s needs is critical

Focus on outcomes not solutions…build to outcomes…and remind your customers of them

The “Critical to Quality (CTQ) Tree” is an excellent (and simple) way of making outcomestangible for you to monitor and measure…and continuously revisit your performance

These tools are great in a project environment….but kept alive in a “business as usual”environment they sustain the buy-in and help maintain your own high standards

Keep the Process Improvement type teams/people engaged with planning – they can providecritical insight and inputs to the planning process plus you can help drive their agenda

Don’t feel that you need to be an expert….choose the tools that feel most relevant and fit withyour aims….don’t lose yourself in technical detail in the name of Six Sigma…

…there is no substitute for good, common sense…..these tools just help you find it sometimes


AVIVA UKGI: Using Common Sense in our Planning

Thank You For Listening

Six Sigma in Planning v1.0 - The Forumplanningforum.co.uk/Portals/0/presentations/seminars/101014/Six...Oct 15, 2010 · AVIVA UKGI: Using Six Sigma in our Planning ... CTQ Tree Critical

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