General Electric, with Jack Welch, and Lean/Six Sigma make a perfect pair as the former strives for perfection and continuous self-improvement, and the latter showing the way how to achieve just that.
The partnership of Lean/Six Sigma, or LSS, and GE has been so good that it is only natural that GE Money, the consumer and small business financial services unit of GE, will also adopt LSS.
CFO.com highlights the benefits of LSS to GE Money, which used it for financial-services operation, such as loan or credit-card application processing. In just three years since GE Money adopted LSS workouts, it was able to do the following:
- In a GE operation in Thailand, where after an LSS workout session, the company was able to cut the processing time for auto loans by 40 percent.
- Reduce the number of fields on an application form for credit cards to make it quicker for the applicant, and work to reduce its application process from 30 days to 2 days.
- Shuffle desks around in the underwriting unit so that there are fewer handoffs.
- More importantly, through LSS workouts, they are able to compile a big dashboard that shows which processes were unnecessary, thereby reducing wastes.
Source:
CFO.com, Six Sigma in Shenzhen
