Question

Provide an example of a process improvement initiative using resources from this week’s readings or your personal experience. Why was the initiative undertaken? What processes were involved in the improvement initiative? Was the initiative an incremental or radical change? Explain. What was the result of the process improvement initiative? Was it successful? Explain. Classify each of the processes included in your example as either core or supporting processes. Provide a rationale for your classification

Answer 1

Process improvement is a continuous activity that needs to be carried out diligently by each organization. But there will be certain periods where the changes that need to be done should be radical in nature so that the entire business can transform. There will also be instances where small changes can be done to business and based on that the entire business supply chain will improve significantly. To understand this more in detail, let us look at a project that was undertaken in a media house.

To understand the work done at Media house, it is vital to understand the supply chain in media industry. The programs are created by Production houses in coordination with programming teams and they undergo extensive video quality checks before the program goes on air.
For a TV program, quality is to ensure that entire program is available with no loss of audio, color or depth of content. It is quite often possible that audio levels of a file can go beyond the permitted TV levels and such cases can occur even after extensive efforts have been put in for mastering. If the quality team observes that the audio channels are beyond the permitted lower or upper levels, such areas are highlighted and shared back to Production houses for error correction. The same goes for Video corrections. There are multiple areas which can have black spots or color glitches or color bars appearing. There can also be causes of frame freeze which can temporarily make the video seem to be paused. Though these are in milliseconds, Media houses have quality check equipment’s which do a thorough check and ensure that all such areas are highlighted. The channels themselves give out huge penalties to media houses if such issues are not taken care of before program goes on air. For any media house which runs 24 x 7, the quality team have to work round the clock to ensure that such issues are identified are highlighted.
At the end of every month, the issues are consolidated and meetings are done with Production houses to share the month`s performance. This is the production cycle for any production/ media house.
The major aspects of quality from media point of view is to have the right video available at the right time with the right audio and subtitle if applicable. If any of these is out of sync, the entire video may not go on air even though all other aspects may be the best.

One method that is used worldwide to address improvement project is using DMAIC. The DMAIC method helps in identifying the problem and helps in analyzing the same to obtain measurable performance improvements in the system. Define, Measure ,Analyze, Improve and Control are the stages that are usually used in Six Sigma projects to quickly identify and evaluate and showcase performance improvements. This is a framework that is used extensively in various project management areas.

In the above case, the use case has been defined. Applying DMAIC we get,
Define – The time taken from Sharing program outline to Broadcast is very high and has to be reduced. The time taken for transfer of content from production house to broadcast center was averaged to 90 mins. This included only the logistic of content. The time taken for rework and sharing the new file are not included in the scope since that is a payment related issue already taken care by the legal teams. If the final content arrives later than the cut-off times, a certain percentage of the content fee would be reduced during the payments. The target is to reduce the time from 90 mins to less than 30 mins. Reduction of more than 65%.
Measure – On measuring the system flow using time motion study we can identify the major gap areas. The highest delay is caused during the transfer of HDD and high resolution content from Production house to Broadcast center. The delay was due to manual logistics and transfer of content via HDD. The time taken across a sample size of 100 transactions averaged to 90 mins.
Analyze – On analyzing the case at hand and using creative techniques to brainstorm new ideas, the solution to implement dedicated lease line P2P setup was obtained. The delay as mentioned earlier is due to lack of use of technology to transfer the content. The reliance on traditional modes and no venturing into newer technologies and solutions are causing the issues in this case.
Improve – The improvement in the area has already been defined in the above stage. It was observed that the results using lease line were far better than when transferred using HDD. The time taken to transfer depended only on the bandwidth allocated and the file size. Once the lease line has been put in place, the logs can be auto filled using the trigger generated by landing of digital file over lease line. On doing the PoC of this, it was identified that for a sample size of 25 transactions, the time taken was reduced to 28 mins. This coupled with the ease of transfer made the business proposition value high for this project. The same can be concluded properly after doing the test for 100 transactions to keep the same sample size.
Control – To ensure the system is up in place and running smoothly, the teams are monitoring the process end to end and identifying the cost vs benefit analysis of increasing the bandwidth and speed of lease lines.

This initiative was undertaken to ensure the entire cycle time between production of content and it going on air can be significantly reduced. This process brought about an incremental change since the testing was done with certain production houses at first and then on successful trial more and more partners were added to the new system and it has proven to be a successful project. Each of the activities which were targeted in the project is a supporting activity. Transferring the content from one place to another is not as important as ensuing the quality of content is good enough to go on-air. But this project highlights the fact even making changes in the supporting activities can help in improving the overall benefits to any organization.