Process Management Providing Better Customer Service in Manufacturing

This is a case of an orthopedic manufacturer getting the best of both worlds, better customer service and saving costs. While customer service was the going-in goal, there were additional monies added to the bottom line of the company. 

The Challenge:

Increase customer feedback capture by 100 percent while decreasing resolution time by 60 percent in a company that had grown by acquisition and had a complicated product mix. The growth of this complexity was robbing R&D and customer service from customer feedback and was extending resolution times. 

The Solution:

Customer processes were presented to various stakeholders for early feedback and buy-in. Prototypes were completed with Microsoft technologies in parallel with processes being crafted in an intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS). This allowed the early feedback to be incorporated in the ultimate processes as the project progressed to completion.

The Results:

The results were impressive in that not only money was saved but time was shaved off of every process over time.  Examples of real benefits were as follows:

The registration process was reduced from five minutes to one minute

There was a 70% reduction in resolution time in the inspection process

Order entry time was reduced by 20%

Inventory carrying costs were reduced by 13%

Payroll per shipment was reduced by 10%

Net; Net:

The deceptive part of process improvement is that you think you are only going to get one benefit, but more times than not it is a set of benefits that flow out of having the better processes. Resulting BPM visibility combined with “hot change” can deliver deeper benefits over time. Not to mention the use of “hot change” during development of the actual processes.  There is no excuse to dodge process benefits.

This is a highly summarized case study provided by PNMsoft  The client has given PNMsoft permission to publish, so if you want more detail see the following link

http://www.pnmsoft.com/resources/case-studies/ossur-case-study/