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| Lean Six Sigma Case Studies |
Reducing Claims Processing Time with Lean and Creative Thinking
Lowering process lead time from eight days to about three hours isn’t easy. You need to apply Lean thinking to the process — to identify value and eliminate waste. Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, also known as HIP, is the largest commercial HMO in New York City based on membership, with approximately 1.3 million members. Including subsidiaries, HIP’s total network comprises nearly 43,000 doctors and other providers in more than 72,000 locations in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. At one HIP facility, eight employees process more than 10,000 paper-based insurance claims per day. Specifically, the team is responsible for sorting and then scanning the claims into a mainframe engine that processes the claims for payment. Needless to say, the accuracy and speed with which incoming claims can be scanned is critical to the accuracy and speed of the overall claims process. View Complete Case Study
Reducing Cycle Time in Aircraft Component Manufacturing
The NORDAM Group, one of the largest independently owned aerospace and aviation companies in the world, recently experienced success with a Lean SCORE™ project aimed at reducing the 11-day lead time for assembling certain small aircraft components. The company suspected that the Cessna metal bond process contained non-value-added activities which, if eliminated, would reduce lead time considerably. View Complete Case Study
Improving Electronic Claims Cycle Time and Accuracy
For many health care providers and payers, optimizing the claims payment process is a common Six Sigma project. Such an endeavor is especially challenging, however, when trying to ensure consistency across multiple departments and facilities, as BayCare Health System hoped to do. BMG proposed a joint project that would help BayCare and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Inc. optimize the electronic claims payment process from end-to-end. The primary objective was to reduce the cycle time for electronic claims, including reworked claims. The project also aimed to increase the number of claims automatically adjudicated and paid (first pass throughput rate). View Complete Case Study
Improving Lab Workflow and Test Turnaround Time
When an organization is in the early stages of deploying a process improvement strategy, efforts can be highly visible and under intense scrutiny. Projects selected during this phase need to be clearly defined and have a high likelihood for success. One way to rack up “early wins” is to use the “quick hitting” toolset of Lean. Canadian-based MDS Diagnostics, Inc. (MDS Metro in British Columbia) demonstrated success early in its deployment with a Lean Kaizen event that also used Six Sigma tools. View Complete Case Study
Using Six Sigma to Reduce Printing Costs
In business, as in life, oversimplifying a problem can be unwise. Our assumptions may not tell the real story. If we don’t know the real story, it’s likely we won’t understand what is actually causing the problem. Six Sigma allows us to systematically reduce the variables to a manageable level and more importantly, to solve the real problem so it doesn’t come back. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Inc. realized that the ratio of employees to printers was excessively low compared with a peer-group study that showed similar organizations had about 6.3 users per printer. BCBSF’s ratio was 1.7 employees per printer, mostly because the company had too many desktop printers versus shared network printers. View Complete Case Study
Improving Productivity and Freight Forwarding Costs
Imagine a long row of more than 50 dock doors into which 18-wheelers drive in and out all day and night, while busy workers unload five million pounds of automotive parts each week. Parallel to this row is another row of 50 dock doors, which feed the same truck trailers with these same parts to be distributed under the NAPA brand. That’s basically the definition of a cross-dock operated by Rayloc Merchandise Distribution Service in Atlanta, Georgia. One of several such cross-docks in the Rayloc system, the Atlanta facility takes parts in from suppliers, then reloads them for transport to more than 60 distribution centers, which in turn parcel them out to wholesalers and retailers all over the country. View Complete Case Study
Reducing ED Wait Time and Improving Patient Satisfaction
If you’ve ever visited an Emergency Department, the word “express” may not come to mind. You may have felt the wait was too long. You may have been asked the same questions over and over again. And you might have noticed there were a lot of people there, some of whom didn’t seem to actually have an emergency. If you’ve been there, rest assured the emergency personnel were probably sharing your frustration. Although ED’s are typically fast-paced, and the staff tries to treat patients as quickly as possible, inefficient processes can result in a chaotic situation for both patients and staff. View Complete Case Study
Reducing Ventilator Days and ICU Length of Stay
The standard treatment for patients who are unable to breathe on their own is to sedate them and put them on a ventilator. In a hospital Intensive Care Unit, patients on ventilators are typically weaned off the device after a few days, when it’s determined that they are capable of breathing on their own. There’s a time period when it is advisable to be on a ventilator. After that, however, patients who are not weaned off ventilation soon enough are in danger of developing any number of related complications. View Complete Case Study
Reducing NPUs and Improving Patient Care
Although pressure ulcers (commonly known as bedsores) are a danger to elderly patients with limited mobility, hospital inpatients of any age can also exhibit the problem. At Thibodaux Regional Medical Center in Louisiana, the rate of inpatients that develop pressure ulcers is much lower than the industry average. Even so, the facility’s Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) data showed a moderate increase between October 2003 and June 2004. Thibodaux’s performance improvement projects focus on five key areas, one of which is quality. Therefore, finding a way to reduce the rate of “defectives” became a perfect Six Sigma project. View Complete Case Study
Clinical and Administrative Improvements with Work-Out
BayCare Health System uses the results-oriented Work-Out methodology to solve a variety of clinical and administrative problems across their nine-hospital system. Work-Out helps participants who are closest to the problem evaluate and implement solutions quickly, often in a single day. This case study features a brief overview of six BayCare Work-Out projects. View Complete Case Study
Reducing Variation in Lacquer Application
If you’ve ever tasted a spoiled soft drink, you’ll agree it’s an experience that could put you off a beverage altogether. Beverage can manufacturers typically spray the inside of cans with lacquer to maintain product taste and prevent product leakage due to corrosion. A company can typically find ways to reduce its costs and remain within the confines of safety requirements by reducing variation and streamlining processes. When it comes to improving these types of processes, the DMAIC methodology and Six Sigma tools can help. Here is how one company used Six Sigma to reduce variation in lacquer application and generate over $100,000 in annual savings. View Complete Case Study
Increasing On-Time Starts for First Case Surgeries
In a hospital operating room, the first scheduled surgery of the day is the only guaranteed start time. If it’s late, the rest of the day may be adversely affected, causing delays for patients and
their families, scheduling conflicts for surgeons and possible overtime for OR staff. When first case on-time starts decreased by 28 percent at BayCare Health System’s Mease Dunedin Hospital, a Six Sigma project was commissioned to get to the root of the problem. View Complete Case Study
Reducing Finishing Defects in Golf Ball Manufacturing
Among the most common applications of Six Sigma in a manufacturing environment is to ferret out the cause of product defects and reduce variation in the production process. Both of these opportunities for improvement can result in substantial cost savings for any organization that successfully meets the challenge. One such company, an international golf ball manufacturer, desired to reduce the number of balls thrown away due to defects in the manufacturing process. Each unusable ball represented lost revenue, as well as wasted time, effort and raw materials, to the tune of an estimated $2 million per year. The company charged a Six Sigma project team with the goal of reducing a specific product line’s finish-related defects from eight percent to less than four percent. View Complete Case Study
Increasing Inpatient Bed Availability to Reduce ED Diverts
What does inpatient bed availability have to do with an Emergency Department’s divert rate? Quite a lot, actually, if the number of people you can accommodate in the ED is dependent on your ability to move patients who require further treatment from the ED to other hospital units. If no inpatient beds are available, patients “stack up” in the ED, and eventually the facility must turn people away. This was the problem that BayCare Health System aimed to solve. The project goal was to increase the number of inpatient discharges that take one hour or less. This would free up more beds earlier in the day, allowing patients to be moved out of the ED and ultimately reducing the ED divert rate. View Complete Case Study
Using eLearning to Drive Culture Change
Performance Excellence methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma have proven successful in a variety of industries, both manufacturing and service-based. Despite this, many organizations still struggle to get employees to embrace the positive changes that a Performance Excellence program can bring. Fear, caused by a lack of understanding, inhibits culture change, which thereby impedes results. So how do you break this cycle? One organization addressed this issue by building an enterprise-wide awareness program that incorporated a message from the CEO with basic awareness training, and delivered it worldwide in eight different languages. The result? A dramatically greater interest from employees wanting to be more involved in the company’s Performance Excellence initiative. View Complete Case Study
Using Six Sigma to Reduce Epoxy Spot Defects
While a company can often reap significant rewards from a simple procedural change, determining the exact nature of that change can be complicated. When a company finds itself in this predicament, the DMAIC methodology and Six Sigma tools can help. Here is how one company used Six Sigma to uncover its greatest potential areas for improvement, then made a single simple change that saved them several hundred thousand dollars. View Complete Case Study
Reducing Employee Turnover in a Hospital System
A three-facility hospital system was facing a challenge with employee turnover. Statistics showed that almost 50 percent of terminations were employees in the first year of their employment with the organization, a number that was more than 20 percent higher than the national average. The hospital system estimated that terminations cost as much as $2.2 million annually, and that reducing terminations could have significant impact on its bottom line by eliminating rework inside the hospital's HR department. View Complete Case Study
Using Six Sigma to Reduce Insurance Claim Denials
Hospitals lose millions of dollars a year on insurance claims that don’t get paid for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the patient’s policy is expired, and other times the insurance company has incorrect information about the patient. Sometimes computer hardware or software malfunctions, causing claims to become lost. In still other cases, patients or physician offices provide incorrect information and this causes a claim to be rejected. This was the issue facing Mercy Medical Center, a 917-bed, non-profit hospital system that employs more than 5,600 people in Des Moines, Iowa. Just one part of that system, outpatient services, was losing revenue on claims that were written off for good by insurance companies. View Complete Case Study
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