At one large company there were too many products for Product Management to manage and for Product Development to maintain. This complexity resulted in poor downstream process performance - in managing releases, in supporting and even selling products. The team used the Design for Six Sigma methodology to develop the process that determined which products and when the product should be discontinued. The team consisted of 17 people from across the business and job functions. Considering the large size of the team, the results were achieved in a relatively short timeframe of only 4 months with the team only meeting weekly. Jen Morrison led the team through included designing a Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey that was sent to the CEO and all of his direct reports. From that data and other key pieces, we designed the process – a very detailed one, covering “swim lanes” - a type of process map that shows the steps in the process in the different swim lane for each function or person doing that step - on nine pages. As well, the team took the hundreds of steps through the FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis), another quality tool that looks at each step in a process and asks what could go wrong in that step and what could be done to prevent said thing from going wrong. A good example of the use of this tool is within car design, as each part affects another. The team used multiple methods to estimate the financial savings of this project and came to an annual savings of over $300,000.
“Thanks for all the hard work you put in on this project! You did a great job of keeping people moving forward, even when they weren't enthusiastic or highly responsive.” - Senior Vice President