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Argon Specific Error Reduction Project Canucks Insurance Company (CIC) offers a wide range of insurance products and services including life insurance, health insurance, annuities, credit

Argon Specific Error Reduction Project Canucks Insurance Company (CIC) offers a wide range of insurance products and services including life insurance, health insurance, annuities, credit insurance, property and casualty insurance, and pension plan services. The company prides itself for providing a complete range of personal insurance products with quality service. It is a credible name in market for over 110 years and positively reviewed and rated well by top rating agencies. It is listed by Forbes Magazine in its "100 Most Trustworthy Companies" in Canada. Its robust and diverse product portfolio as well as good customer service and high service offering ensured long term success of CIC. It can bank upon its credibility to acquire new customers. It has been successful with more product offering and services and trying to attract clients who are looking to switch their existing Insurance Carrier. Despite its success, CIC management is concerned about its future. In recent years, due to low interest rate scenario in Canada hurts the profitability of the insurers. CIC is also facing highly competitive market leading to declining market share. Increase in complexity in the regulatory framework that company must comply with poses a threat to company. Rick Meyers, Vice President of Eastern region of CIC has been hearing lots of complaints from Corporate customers on Group Benefits (GB) plan setup. It appears that Quality is declining. He asked Linda McArther, Director of Corporate accounts to investigate to better assess the situation. ARGON is CIC's proprietary application software for setting up and update group benefits (GB) policy for claim processing. GB Plan Setup Team is experiencing high volume of errors due to ARGON coding/data entry. For example, during April-June time period, ARGON error rate for Corporate clients was 32.61%, highest among all other system specific errors. ARGON error rate for small and medium size business was only 2% during the same period. The operation manager Alex Rodriguez reviewed historical data with Linda and concluded that the problem started beginning of this year. Error rate higher than 5% will cause extreme customer dissatisfaction. Rick and Linda set the goal of reducing error rate by at least 25% by end of Q3 of this year. If this goal is met, Plan Setup team will experience less customer complaints, rework, over time and will be able to reduce Lead Time. New Corporate clients will have positive onboarding experience. A recent report from Finance indicates that Plan Setup team can reduce over $560,000 in overtime if they can achieve this goal. The excessive overtime is due to 100% quality audit to detect mistakes and then correct those errors. Objectives are to come up with a set of prioritized short term and long term actionable, achievable, and measurable recommendations that will reduce ARGON specific error rate by 25% for Corporate plan setup. However, there are potential challenges with a DMAIC project. CIC has employee presence internationally and most of the subject matter experts (SME) work in a different time zone. A trend analysis reveals that most of the errors are committed by CIC's Manila location employees. Six Sigma core team resides in Kitchener, Ontario. Moreover, due to peak season, SMEs have very limited availability. CIC's GB Plan setup team also has very limited Data available. Both Rick and Linda decided to launch a DMAIC Six Sigma project to reduce number of errors. They have appointed you, a Six Sigma Green Belt, to execute the project. They have asked that you work with Emily Kirkland and Ronnie Beaver from Manila branch to do root cause analysis. Both Emily and Ronnie will be your Subject matter experts (SME). You will also work with Stephanie Roy, a Financial analysist to validate project cost and benefits.

Using the above case study we have to fill below table:

Project title

Project sponsor

Project champion

Project team members(s)

Project problem statement

Examples:

  1. Over the period from June 07 to December 08, the median closure time for audit issues was 84 days. This length of time is about 1.5 times higher than the desired value at the Waterloo location.
  2. Over the period from November 07 and January 08, the rate of first-pass invoice approval was 25%. This situation is about 3.5 times less than the desired value and leads to many cycles of rework.

The charter's problem statement should not contain a cause or solution.>

Project objective

In scope

Out of scope

The scope should be at an actionable level. Specify products, locations, customers impacted, and so on.

Examples:

  1. The project focuses on the training development process for upcoming SET training courses only
  2. Use data available on the development process of two (2) previous SET courses (PDP Practitioner and Six Sigma)>

Examples

  1. The project will be executed only on training courses available at the time of the Six Sigma training program (September 2007 to March 2008)
  2. The project will focus on SET processes and will not include external subject matter expert's processes, which can influence the planning phase of the training projects>

Project CTQ (also called project metric or Y)

Examples:

  1. Delivery cycle time for product X (maximum acceptable value = 12 hrs)
  2. Difference between planned effort and actual effort (maximum acceptable value = 20% )

Defect definition

  1. Any delivery that takes more than 12 hours
  2. Slippage of more than 20% on planning estimates >

Benefits

Examples:

  1. Project will minimize planning time and rework and will lead to a cost saving of $1.1 million by 2008
  2. Resources can be optimized and allocated to other projects
  3. New process will result in significant reduction in customer dissatisfaction and improved customer rating (more than 8 on a scale of 1-10.>

Required resources

.

Phase completion schedule

DMAIC phase

Phase completion date

Define (includes as-is process mapping)

Measure

Analyze

Improve

Control

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