Pitney Bowes Canada Delivers Better Customer Service with Time to Market Savings

Customer Satisfaction is top priority for Pitney Bowes(PB), a provider of communications technology solutions for small, mid-size and large firm. But despite recent improvement efforts, the company had identified there were still situations where they were finding it difficult to get Customer Service Time within agreed service levels and error rates. To address the issue they designed and practically implemented a new "Automated Rapid Process Improvement" approach, based on Process Discovery Software (process mining), that  boosts the efficiency of  process improvement projects and has brought large savings. For this project Pitney Bowes won PEX Network's Best Process Improvement Project Under 90 days announced during PEX Week USA, January 2014.

The Challenge:

Despite the improvement efforts, PB have continued to experience the situations when Customer Service Time(CST) did not meet Service Level Agreement (SLA) and error rates exceeded the acceptable level. In addition, employees had difficulties to properly complete some repeatable processes resulting in high operational cost. All of this had to be completed under the gun as management wanted significant results in a the shortest time.

The Solution:

For understanding and measurement of existing processes PB had chosen StereoLOGIC Discovery Analyst - an advanced process discovery tool. Leveraging this new mining and visualization technology, employee operations were monitored and corresponding business process maps were generated and visualized automatically. The process time and the time associated with each activity were also measured by the mining tool automatically and presented in MS-Excel format. The discovered better practice processes and training materials were documented automatically for many to follow consistently.

The automated comparison of similar processes executed by different employees has enabled PB to reveal deviations, wasted time and errors. The tool helped process engineers to visualize the path between the problem and its root cause and communicate this information to other team members. The analysts generated problem reports including inefficient processes and traceability to problem sources supported by time metrics, systems screens, and related data. They identified 7 issues causing errors and wasted time in the process, estimated their impact on the current cost of each transaction and estimated potential savings and transaction cost which came true. This lead to rapid results that astonished many people involved.

The Results:

In just 2 weeks the team has revealed the average wasted time of 43.5% and average error rate of 20% They also identified unnecessary process complexity and lack of training were determined to be the main root causes of errors and delays. They discovered that more than 50% of these delays and errors could be fixed in a very short time and simplified the 50% of the processes as they were base-lined.

Cut the customer service response time by 56%

Reduced the error rates (errors in servicing customers) from 20% to ~0%

8 consecutive months above 65% NSAT (Global Corporate Target for Customer Satisfaction – first team to achieve globally)

Reduced the operational cost by 30%

Net; Net:

Process discovery (aka process mining) is a great contributor to process intelligence and can deliver very quick and impressive results

This is a highly summarized case study provided by StereoLOGIC

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