Lean Six Sigma: Success Story in the Banking industry

Operational excellence and Lean play pivotal roles in the banking industry. As a company, we, therefore, aim to enable and guide various companies to integrate them into their culture. Here, we’ll highlight our path to instilling operational excellence to target specifically two areas within a banking company – reconciliation values, and mismatched entries. Our preliminary aim was to eliminate these to alleviate the overall efficiency of the workplace operations. Here’s how we went about it:

Challenges to Success

The challenges that we found here could be broadly categorized into 1 area of interest – reconciliation. It is a non-value-added process and consumes excess time and effort to resolve. The bottom line is that we don’t wish reconciliation volumes to grow alongside our business! Some important statistics that we found were as follows:

1. First, over 800+ unmatched entries are allocated on the source code every day, of which 25% are newly allocated.
2. Second, over 100+ investigation advice is sent every day on the new allocations.
3. Third, over 42% of unmatched entries get manually matched every day.

Therefore, a better system that provides reference numbers can significantly reduce or eliminate the need to manually match the unmatched entries. As a result, this would also reduce the time and effort spent on them. The goal was to eliminate unmatched entries by 70% – which included new allocations and those which get manually matched after preliminary investigation.

Lean Six Sigma-Solutions for Efficient Banking Operations

Using a Lean Six Sigma framework, we arrived at the following solutions to the issue at hand:

• First, we had to map the current state using current state value stream mapping.
• Second, we were to identify improvement opportunities.
• Lastly, we needed to address improvement opportunities using Lean and Six Sigma techniques.

2 extremely salient aspects without which this successful improvement initiative using Lean Six Sigma could not be carried out is both top management involvement and process stakeholders’ commitment.

Results of Lean Six Sigma-Integration

The impact of these improvement strategies was phenomenal:

• First, there was a 57% reduction in mismatched entries reported by the source code.
• Next, 5 categories of unmatched entries were eliminated using ‘mistake proofing’ principles.
• Finally, the entire project produced an annual saving of 85,000 euros!

Therefore, the benefits of incorporating Lean Six Sigma into your company’s framework, especially in the banking sector, are limitless. By combining the power of technology, science, and people engagement, we ensure an enjoyable and exciting improvement journey! One’s own success story is the best form of motivation to continue this journey, so check out other case studies where we implemented Lean Six Sigma and operational excellence to guarantee organizational success!