Reflection - Visualization

Challenge and Selection  Handling payroll calculation for a labour intensive industry is always painful.  There  are numerous transactions (such as leave and attendance data, overtime payment,  additional allowance, etc) to deal with within a very tight schedule.      Our payroll team only has 2 working days to process such data for 3,000+ staff and  during these 2 days, the team has to work overtime.  We have a checklist which lists  out each step to make sure all transactions are properly recorded and procedures are  in correct order.  This checklist helps us to complete the payroll process in an

accurate manner, but it can’t help us to shorten the processing time.  We need to  find ways to shorten the time.    In order to figure out where the bottleneck is and have a clearer picture of the flow,  our team decided to visualize all activities and parties involved for the whole payroll  process by drawings.  Visualization is analysing the current situation and find out  possible ways to shorten the processing time through drawing.    Application and Insight

We spent an afternoon, using simple diagrams and arrows, outlying (1) the  connections of each task, (2) parties involved, (3) time spent and (4) data flow for the  process on the whiteboard.  By visualizing the whole process and the connection,

we spotted out the possible steps which could be combined by reshuffling the jobs  and the tasks which might be done earlier.  We identified certain tasks which may  be simplified with the assistance of other departments as well.    We then drew a new diagram, which combined our thoughts and ideas.  We shared  this diagram with related parties and discussed our proposed new flow with them.    As the diagram showed the steps and ideas clearly, everyone understood what we

intend to do easily and they gave instant feedback.  The diagram worth thousand  words!  We then further fine tune the flow and found that the processing time  could be shortened by 0.5 working day.  We will adopt the new flow and trail for 2  months, after that, we will sit down and review the effectiveness of the new flow and  further discuss new insights.

Approach

Going forward, our team will review the process by visualization on a regular basis  and find out any possible improvement area and work with other department to  smoothen and shorten the whole process.  As visualizing the process is the key for  us to figure out the problems for our case, it helps us to find the bottleneck, grasps  actionable insights, figure out possible solutions and more importantly, it allows us to  discuss the flow with other departments easily.

