By trade · Banking, insurance and back office
Lean Six Sigma in banking, insurance and back-office operations
In a back office, the actual work is a minor fraction of the delay the customer suffers — the rest is spent queuing, awaiting approval and going back and forth for missing information. That is why timing the workstations there produces almost no visible gain.
Those waits appear on no dashboard: nobody counts open files the way pallets get counted, although the quantity is the same and produces the same effects. Making them visible is often the first project, and the most profitable.
The tools illustrated by a case from this sector
6 entries reviewed in English — 6 entries in all on the French page.
Seven wastes
The seven wastes classify everything a process consumes without the customer having asked for it: overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion and defects.
Lean tools · case: Financial services
Process performance indicators
Performance indicators measure a process from a few complementary angles — quality, lead time, cost — distinguishing those that record a result from those that announce a drift.
Measurement and indicators · case: Financial services
SIPOC
A SIPOC describes a process on one page in five columns — suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, customers — to agree on its scope before analysing it.
Method · case: Financial services
Lean fundamentals
Lean seeks to give the customer what they value while consuming as few resources as possible. Five principles organise the approach: define value, map the flow, make it continuous, pull it by demand, aim for perfection.
Method · case: Financial services
Flow (one-piece, push, pull)
Flow describes the way work moves from one step to the next. Lean seeks to make it continuous and to trigger it by real demand rather than by forecasts.
Lean tools · case: Insurance claims processing
ECRS — eliminate, combine, rearrange, simplify
ECRS is a grid of questions applied to each operation of a process, in an order that is not negotiable: can it be removed, grouped, moved, or made simpler?
Lean tools · case: Bank back office
Practise
The training corpus is not split by sector: the questions are about the tools, which are the same everywhere, and the certifications do not split their exams by sector either. To find your level, the shortest way is a fifteen-question quiz, no account needed:
The other trades: Lean Six Sigma by sector.