This approach can be explained through the example of a leading self-driving vehicle technology provider for whom Wipro is a partner in services related to operations and quality control activities. The customer has a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going using self-driving technology. For Wipro, it is one of the most prestigious and strategically important accounts to be aligned with, and has constant focus on customer delight.
Let us understand the scope of process excellence for VUCA processes. Input for the process is deﬁned by the available technology and objective of the process.
INPUT - Improvement opportunities in the input has to be highlighted by the service provider but has dependency on the customer to get it implemented. On ground team is responsible for suggesting changes based on the Gemba (where value is added to the product or service) observations and their understanding of business. Customer should be open and encouraging for such suggestions as they come directly from the users of their tools.
PROCESS - Scope of improvement can be realized through lean and process automation opportunities which ﬂare up through value stream mapping and key stroke mapping. Any proposal on the workﬂow change, non-value activities, latency in process, process wastes is the responsibility of the service providers. It is important to calibrate the process ﬂow with the business requirement. For one of the most critical and time-bound processes, the team was missing SLA adherence to TAT as it was following a FIFO approach. Some tasks are ambiguous and agents waited for clariﬁcation which had a cascading effect on TAT of other tasks.
Changing to LIFO approach was a game changer for Wipro as the SLA adherence improved from 70% to >98% by eradicating the effect of ambiguous tasks on others. Thus, it is important to judge the requirement of the process and plan the process ﬂow accordingly.
OUTPUT - Feedback on the output should be gathered from the customers to understand the relevance of services provided. On the other hand, costumers should engage strategically with the service provider to get operational insights. This output feedback provides a reference to measure the actual quality of the VUCA processes. Take the example of the driverless vehicle technology company for which Wipro provides operational services. The only way to measure the quality of work done by Wipro is through the way the vehicle reacts to various scenarios.
CONTROL - Process excellence team should device control plans and checklists to assure that any process improvements are maintained over the life cycle. Keeping a check on the agreed success metrics to detect any deviation is important for any process. Real-time dashboards help in surfacing any variations in the performance. The only way the customers can feel that the process is in control is through various real-time performance related dashboards.
ENABLERS - For a VUCA process, process enablers like policies, tools and resources are very critical for success. Any error in the enablers can lead to rework or complete failure. For the service provider, it is important to be vigilant and inquisitive with the process enablers to stay relevant. There should be a mechanism and process for suggesting changes in policies based on the new scenarios and it should be inclusive at all levels.
Key implementations for business process improvement
In this section, we look at a few initiatives taken by the Wipro team in managing and improving the process for VUCA business for its customer. Quality tools like Lean and Six Sigma can be implemented only after exploring and studying the VUCA processes and business situation. Phrasing the problem statement is the key to it and it is important to be open toward truly understanding the problem rather than going straight toward the solution. Volatility and uncertainty of such processes bring a lot of stress and risk in the work culture. This stress brings “unconscious bias” toward an earlier experience of a similar situation challenging the efﬁcacy of improvement projects. There is a requirement to think afresh for a tailor-made solution even for basic problems. Automation opportunities must be explored for every Lean project identiﬁed to ensure that the solution provided stays relevant with time.
When the process is uncertain, its complexity often gets overanalyzed, which makes any improvement project look farfetched. It is important to have the basics in place for such processes and then have six sigma and lean projects implemented over them. Below are some of the rudimentary elements of process excellence for VUCA processes
Establishing right measurement system
It is important for any business to have a parameter to measure the present situation and plan their improvement journey ahead. Customers expect customized assistance in terms of establishing performance parameters along with the analytical tools to understand the usage, patterns, process limitations and improvement areas.
VUCA processes are very dynamic as the scope of the business and the work instructions often have ambiguity, subjective policies and new scenarios. Establishing productivity and quality targets may not be possible due to the complexity of the process.
Wipro Solution - For the self-driving vehicle technology provider, data on productivity and quality were collected for the stabilization and ramp-up period. As the nature of the business was dynamic, relative quality and productivity metrics were deﬁned through sanitized and logically selected historical data. After considering the variations in the inﬂuencing factors, daily work units for agents were deﬁned. This took care of the complexity and other variations within different tasks and provided a common scale to measure the performance. These quality efﬁciency and productivity efﬁciency baselines served as a medium to measure performance and drive business with mutually agreed incremental targets.
Traction of the performance is equally important as setting benchmarks. Provisions should be made to have a clear and real-time reﬂection of the actual performance of the operators. This will warrant delivery and quality as planned and structured and prevent any situation of bedlam. In the absence of performance reporting and visualization of the data generated, the process can go off track and deviate from its objective. Customers want to have visibility on all facets of business, and not just metrics.
Wipro Solution - For the self-driving vehicle technology provider, Wipro provided various dashboards which can reﬂect the daily performance of the team and highlight the key challenges. Along with that, dashboards reﬂecting ﬁnancial ﬁgures, error trends and other process-speciﬁc KPIs were provided. Auto-generated emails showing daily performance were also implemented to keep all relevant stakeholders informed. Wipro was able to provide this using the infrastructure of the clients and eradicating any challenges of data leakage. These dashboards provided a platform to judge the performance of the operators and incentivize them accordingly.
Since new business processes are complex and challenging to get trained into, a work breakdown approach is followed. The whole set of work needs to be broken into a few buckets based on similarity in work instructions. But as the process is dynamic, having sufﬁcient work in each bucket is difﬁcult. This leads to an increase in wait time for new task creation and underutilization of the operators deployed.
Wipro solution - To tend to this issue of operator wait time due to unavailability of tasks, a training academy was implemented. This had two aspects to it
i) To cross-train operators in different buckets
ii) To provide a progression path to become a process SME to build a map of an area, all the tasks generated for linear, polygonal and signals need to be completed.
The team was facing a challenge of uneven load as there were different volumes of tasks in the 3 buckets. Thus, some agents would be overburdened and some had no volume to work on. Cross-training high performers and turning them into Flexperts helped in resolving such challenges.
Overburdening someone beyond their capability was also tracked for effectiveness through close monitoring of the Flexperts in the initial days, and if required, additional mentor support was provided.
To check the alignment of the operators with the revised policies and work instructions, there is a requirement to create periodic quiz tasks and map all the operators on the same grounds on their awareness. Quiz tasks have deadlines and are supposed to be completed by the operators within the project deadline. The efﬁcacy of this plan can be challenged as the quiz used to be rolled out for everyone at the same time, and the operators used to pay extra attention to them. Thus, quizzes were no longer a reﬂection of the scenario on the ﬂoor. To resolve this issue, provisions should be made to make the quizzes randomized for the operators.
Wipro Solution - When a quiz task is created, a random timestamp between is selected and stored as the quiz's available after_ timestamp in the quiz creation tool. Once the timestamp passes the quiz would be injected as the next task in a worker's queue. The intent is to randomly distribute the quizzes over time to avoid all the operators getting the same task at the same time, thus revealing the task as a quiz and not a normal, production task. Tool has been scripted to determine the quiz’s availability by assigning a unique availability window for each operator. The tool will allocate a quiz task to the agents on any day of the week.