How many of your bills are over 30 days past due? It may seem counter-intuitive to some that it is good to pay your bills on time, but in one project we did for Company X (Fortune 500 company name withheld) we saved them $150,000 annually with a cycle time improvement of 172,700% in just 4 months by improving their process for paying their bills. Every time a bill had incorrect information on it or there were questions about it there was a ton of wasted effort being spent researching when the majority of the time the bill was being blocked for no good reason. After following the Six Sigma methodology by defining the problem with data, analyzing the data, improving the process, and putting controls in place to keep the problems from happening again, they know if a “problem” bill is worth taking the time and effort to research its amount.
