Instantis Helps Xerox Track Lean Six Sigma Success
Instantis EnterpriseTrack Six Sigma Software
Xerox Corp. has a 60-year history of leading the document technology and services industry, using proven quality methods, processes and tools.
Xerox has won (and continues to win) countless international and industry quality awards for its technology and processes, including two Baldrige Awards and a Deming Prize. Xerox has proven year after year its unwavering commitment to one of its core values, which states, "We deliver quality and excellence in all we do."
However, ensuring quality and improving performance within a $15 billion company employing almost 58,000 people worldwide takes more than just commitment. In today's networked "virtual" world, advanced information systems and extendible process-improvement techniques are essential to keep cross-functional, geographically dispersed teams working together. Such an infrastructure is critical to ensure that quality improvement is achieved and then extended across the organization.
In 2002, Chairman and CEO Anne Mulcahy, along with Xerox's senior leadership, launched the Xerox Lean Six Sigma Initiative as a foundation of its strategy to meet the latest challenges in improving productivity, reducing waste and increasing Xerox's value-add to customers. A Xerox Lean Six Sigma Deployment Team, led by Vice President Art Fornari, was charged with starting and sustaining the program across Xerox's entire global enterprise.
"Implementing our Lean Six Sigma Initiative offered the opportunity to find immediate savings and efficiencies, but without compromising Xerox's core commitment to quality," says Fornari. "The company's long-term goal is to make lean Six Sigma the way we work at Xerox. We're committed to rapidly evolving our culture to be smarter in how we work, quicker to anticipate and respond to what customers need, and consistent in using fact-based decisions to deliver better results for the company and our customers."
"A critical factor in our Xerox Lean Six Sigma recipe is measurable economic profit from our projects," says Sue Moore, finance director for the program. From a systems perspective, Moore and the corporate team saw an immediate need for a centralized management and reporting solution that could effectively track and coordinate an ever-growing portfolio of lean Six Sigma improvement projects.
"Such a system needed to respond to our changing requirements over time as we learned more about what kind of information we wanted to track," notes Moore.
As a starting point, the solution needed to consolidate all project data and work requirements into a central repository. This would allow the different managers, financial teams, executives and project teams to each access and contribute to their assigned projects, or to view the overall performance of their group.
Access rights and user permissions would need to be tightly controlled to ensure that documents wouldn't become lost or corrupted, and that project responsibilities and security could be allocated only to the specific members of the team. To support rapid deployment of the initiative, the system would have to be flexible enough to support different processes and approaches already in use by different teams within the company.
To meet this need, the Xerox deployment team turned to Instantis Inc. of Sunnyvale, California. Instantis' EnterpriseTrack Six Sigma software solution offered Xerox a fully-featured application designed specifically for planning, managing and tracking Six Sigma projects across large global organizations and over differing business groups.
"We knew early on that it would be far simpler, more cost-effective and much faster if we could purchase a packaged solution vs. building and designing a system internally," says Moore. "The Instantis solution was not only complete and fully featured; it was also flexible and easily adapted to fit our specific needs."
Now into its third year, the initiative involves all major operations. The Instantis EnterpriseTrack system currently tracks the contributions of:
• 30 full-time deployment managers
• More than 600 Master Black Belts and Black Belts
• 2,500 Green Belts
• 22,000 Yellow belts
• More than 1,600 projects completed or currently underway
New users and teams join the system each day, and additional features and capabilities are added on an ongoing basis. The system allows users to collaborate more effectively and improvement processes to be shared and evaluated more consistently. Project cycle times are being reduced, and project performance quality continues to increase.
Instantis EnterpriseTrack Six Sigma Software
- Complete enterprisewide Six Sigma solution
- Track and manage entire project portfolios
- Directly align strategy and execution
- Coordinate multiple improvement initiatives
www.instantis.com
|
