In the course of my employment in a customer contact center, I also did a study on the factors or attributes of productive agents working in the chat-based customer contact center. A separate Six Sigma Project was also deployed in support of increasing their productivity. Please refer to the attachment.

**Note: For security reasons, name of the company is withheld intentionally.

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Six Sigma Basics 1 for Beginners – P1,500/day per person
This whole day seminar will cover the basic quality tools and introduction to the methodology of Six Sigma.
Does not require statistical software, only calculator and paper. Light discussion of statistical concepts.

Six Sigma Strategic Deployment for Managers – P2,000/day per person
This whole day seminar will cover the methodology of Six Sigma, how to compute benefits(reduce cost and increase profits), deployment strategies within the organization covering project planning and prioritization, incentive system, project management system and balanced scorecard.
Does not require statistical software, only calculator and paper. Light discussion of statistical concepts.

Lean Manufacturing Systems- P1,500/day per person
Learn how the concepts of making your production systems more efficient and cost-effective by taking out the wastes and non-value adding activities to be able to deliver the products on time and with good quality.
Does not require statistical software, only calculator and paper. Light discussion of statistical concepts.

Lean Customer Service System – P1,500/day per person
Learn how the concepts of making your business processes and customer service systems more efficient and cost-effective by taking out the wastes and non-value adding activities to be able to deliver the service and products on time and with good quality.
Does not require statistical software, only calculator and paper. Light discussion of statistical concepts.
All training curriculum are customizable according to training need and application.  Requires separate and advance discussion of training design prior to main training itself.

This is the generic training curriculum.  Total training hours is 40 hours = 1,500/day per person X 5 days

            = 7,500.00 per person

This curriculum is customizable according to the field of application and training need.

You may also decide to take only a portion.  This training includes hands on statistics computation with MINITAB.

For details pls contact me at my mobile = 0906-4567834 or mail – jeremyjay_lim@yahoo.com

Attrition is one of the dreaded things in service industry.

In a BPO center I have worked in I mentored a Green Belter working on an attrition reduction project.

Agent Attrition was at 15% for their department. 

This was high and it leads to high agent training cost and recruitment cost. 

In general, causes of attrition are endless and plotting them out using Fishbone analysis would be futile.

Here are the few strategic advices that I provided to the GB project leader:

1. Properly select the scope of the attrition that one should work on
   • What department, team or shift
   • From what employment stage up to what employment stage ie. from Training stage up to employee exit or from endorsement to operations up to employee exit.  Number of attrition may differ according to the points of measurement
   • Wanted (dismissed employees) or Unwanted attrition (voluntary resignees)
   • scope should still be big or small enough to have acceptable financial benefit for the company because working on reducing the attrition of 1 team would not provide us at least 50,000USD annual est. benefit
2. Measure phase:
   • Process mapping should be aligned to the employee’s employment life such that it would be enough to cover the potential causes of attrition occuring in each step of his/her employment life
   • Project team can subjectively do prioritization of the causes using Prioritization matrix.  Prioritization can be based on their interviews, Focus group discussions (FGD), observations, expert knowledge, observation and/or reports
   • Employee survey maybe helpful but it would only give results pertaining to the motivational factors or employee retention factors because only the active(existing) employees of the companies can only give feedback.  Unless the project leader would be willing to do exhaustive exit interviews and call backs of resigned (attrition) employees.
   • Data supporting the prioritized attrition factors can help solidify the hypothesis statements that can be formed for the Analyze phase ie. excessive overtime, poor leadership or teamwork, uncompetitive company benefits
3. Analyze Phase:
   • Data gathered earlier can be used for making conclusive hypothesis statements
   • Survey results can also be analyzed using proportion tests
   • Qualitative analysis may help identify the causes but again these should be backed up with data
4. Improve Phase:
   • Proposals should be supported by the Champion, the top management and by the HR department
   • Improvement items that would come out of the Green Belt project are usually strategic and would need management support for it to be rolled out or deployed
   • Improve phase for Attrition reduction project does not need much of analysis and optimization such as DOE.  However, as mentioned by another Black Belt colleague of mine, it is also possible to model the probability of attrition mathematically.  This part remains an area for research for me, I might first look into the usage of the Binary Logistics Regression
   • It would be helpful as well to try using the Kano analysis if the improvement items would really impact on employee retention and reduction of attrition.  Employee engagement should not be considered as directly proportional to Employee retention based on my observation.  It does not necessarily mean that an engaged employee would have small probability of considering moving out of the company given an attractive or enticing opportunity.
5. Control Phase:
   • It would be helpful for the company to develop a regular monitoring of the employee attrition, set up of early detection for demotivation leading to attrition
   • In one of our learnings, we found out also that there is a some percentage of demotivated persons does not really lead to attrition especially if the company did an extra mile of converting those persons back to being engaged and happy with their work.  That is where employee relations come in.

 The GB project leader working on this attrition project actually finished the project with the support of the Department head.  Attrition gradually decreased.  Monitoring is still being done in a proactive manner that is by earlier detecting the employee motivation levels, settling of employee grievances at the onset.  It is also important that management should be wary that attrition is also seasonal such that it is always lowest during the 4th Q of the year because of the bonuses and 13th month pay coming out on the last month of the year.

PS.  If you want to know more details please post or consult me. Thanks. 

Pioneered at Motorola in the mid-1980s, Six Sigma was initially targeted to quantify the defects occurred during manufacturing processes, and to reduce those defects to a very small level. Motorola claimed to have saved several million dollars. Another very popular success was at GE. Six Sigma contributed over US $ 300 million to GE’s 1997 operating income.

Originally, Six Sigma was defined as a metric for measuring defects and improving quality; and a methodology to reduce defect levels below 3.4 Defects Per (one) Million Opportunities (DPMO). Six Sigma is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola, Inc who has reported over US$17 billion savings from Six Sigma to date.

Six Sigma has now grown beyond defect control. It can be defined as a methodology to manage process variations that cause defects, defined as unacceptable deviation from the mean or target; and to systematically work towards managing variation to eliminate those defects. The objective of Six Sigma is to deliver world-class performance, reliability, and value to the end customer.

It is important to recall that every customer always values consistent and predicable services and/or products with near zero defects. Therefore they experience the variation and not the mean. Mean is their expectation or our target.

If we can measure process variations that cause defects i.e. unacceptable deviation from the mean or target, we can work towards systematically managing the variation to eliminate defects. It is implemented via two potential scenarios – (a) there is already an existing process(s) that is working “reasonably” well and (b) there is no process at all or the process is considered to be poor.

Scenario (a) focuses on significant process improvements and requires use of DMAIC:

* Define process goals in terms of key critical parameters (i.e. critical to quality or critical to production) on the basis of customer requirements or Voice Of Customer (VOC)
* Measure the current process performance in context of goals
* Analyze the current scenario in terms of causes of variations and defects
* Improve the process by systematically reducing variation and eliminating defects
* Control future performance of the process

My Resume 2008


 

External Six Sigma trainings costs as follows:
Green Belt (40hours, 5 days) – 200~250 thousand pesos
Black Belt (80 hours, 10 days) – 500 thousand pesos
Lightspeed Learning Training fee – 1,500 Pesos/day per person (Introductory Discount) 

More details to follow.  You may post your queries here if interested

Contact me:

Jeremy Jay Lim,

Black Belt Certified

0906-4567834