Learning Launch Tool

Challenge:   The sales and Quality Assurance (QA) people in our company spend a lot of time processing  detailed complaint reports which are required by law. This means the sales people have to  perform a task of entering complaint reports based on data received by customers for which they  are not specialists and that the QA people often have to go back to the sales team with additional  questions about the data entered since often data is mistaken or incomplete in the reports. In  addition the QA people also spend time translating these reports to submit to the head oﬃce  abroad.  These people spend therefore to much time on BVA (Business Value-Added) time. We need to  reduce this time so that the two groups can spend more time of real value added time such as  selling products for the sales people.

Selection of the learning launch tool:  In order to increase internal process eﬃciency we used the learning launch tool to improve, but as  the video in this course mentions, this should not only be based on assumptions, but fast and  cheap experiments should be performed to test a hypothesis. In this case our customers were  internal stakeholders, no external customers involved, which should actually make the learning  launch tool easier to implement because stakeholders could easily be involved in the testing.

Application:

State with a hypothesis:

Idea  Report automation by using our current online ordering system. Reports could be submitted online by the  sales team. The ordering system already contains part of the information needed for the reports and  therefore part of the data could be pre-populated leading to time eﬃciency and less mistakes (online error  check). Also the system could partially translate the reports automatically.

Speciﬁc group of customers  In this case two internal stakeholder groups are the customers: 1) Sales people who write and submit reports

2) Quality Assurance (QA) people who process these reports

Needs  1) Currently spending a long time writing paper reports, scanning this submitting the reports by email.

2) Since the reports are handwritten by the sales staﬀ, many errors and omissions occur. A pre-check tool  would help. On top of that the QA people need to translate these reports.

The idea meets that need:  We need process improvement, involving BVA (Business Value-Added) time reductions so that the two  groups can spend more time of real value added time such as selling products for the sales people.

Better than the current alternatives  With an online submission system the submissions would be faster because some data can be  automatically retrieved from the system and allowing for automatic error checks. Also there would be no  more need to translate these reports manually.

Value creation	 	 Execution 	 Defendability 	 Scalability

time eﬃciency	 	 project team & 		 approved/buy-in	 not applicable

external vendor		 during kick-oﬀ

based on one test

Prioritize key assumptions  - Should lead to process time eﬃciency for sales and QA teams.

- Who will do the test: Sales and QA members assigned - How to do the test:   Enter excel sheet template created by QA - Timeframe:                2 days - Cost:                         None

Design Test for Key Assumptions  - Both the sales team and the QA team did separate time calculation prognosis too ﬁnd out how much

time could be saved with the new system

Do the test  - Result: signiﬁcant time savings

Data conﬁrmed based on one test, with minor improvements needed to optimize the plan.

Insight gained from applying the tool:  The hypothesis part of the learning launch tool went well but we needed data (no assumptions  and guesses) to conﬁrm. The problem is that we have conﬁrmation bias. We would need to go out  and ﬁnd conﬁrming and disconﬁrming facts.  We did talk thoroughly with a limited number of sales and QA people in one-on-one and small  team meetings to go through the hypothesis to ﬁnd out conﬁrming and disconﬁrming facts.  The only experiment we did is go through the process and calculate possible time savings for  both the sales team and the QA team, but we could have done some more testing such as actual  observations to conﬁrm our hypothesis. The learning process was therefore not extensive enough,   but still suﬃcient. We were able to make some adjustments based on feedback (optimization to  allow for better results and smoother acceptance) and get the project approved by the head  oﬃce.

Approach:  We have a good core team from various backgrounds working on this project, but what could  have been improved in earlier stages to improve conﬁrmation bias, improve quantity and quality of  data?  - We did have a kick-oﬀ meeting with everyone involved but we should have done more

meetings with all stakeholders in earlier stages.

- We should have talked with more members of the team (set a percentage such as 50% of the

team members we should have talked with).

- We could have made a questionnaire for all stakeholders to test conﬁrming and disconﬁrming

facts.

- We could have observed the process of entering and processing the reports. - We could have done more brainstorming to get more ideas. - We need to improve our company culture to allow for minor failures in order to avoid larger

failures.

