Value Stream Mapping
Our organization’s strategy is based on the narrow buyers segment that is focused on differentiation of services. In the Porter’s Five Generic Competitive Strategies, the approach is known as Focused Differentiation Strategy. The organization is a consultancy firm that provides services in the field of Telecom Engineering, Defenses communication, and Transport sector with Telecom operators being the largest segment of our market. Our specialization in the field of telecom engineering consultancy has generated for us a very well know brand in our market as one of the top Telecom consultancies in the region. Although our market niche is very narrow with a handful number of customers, their significant buying power and the size of long-term projects have provided us with a unique opportunity to offer customized services. Further, our customized services designed to address the needs of the customers confirm our strategy of narrow customer buyers. Thus, the mix of our specialized brand in the telecom consultancy service industry, talented resources, business automation tools, and project management experience are the primary differentiators from our rivals. Also, our capability of providing meaningful and measurable progress report against preset KPIs through visualized digitized Dashboard and extensive reports that can be accessed through mobile or desktop application have provided us a competitive advantage in the market.
Organization part and involved processes
My responsibility in the organization is the largest account belonging to a telecom operator that we provide project management consultancy services. The responsibility includes project delivery and quality improvement processes.
Our customers and the output services
Our customer is the Network Implementation General Department in Network Sector of the Telecom Operator. The network Implementation is one of the largest departments in the operator that manages the delivery of multi-projects that are close to two billion USD in value a year. The annual budget covers a large number of projects that we are involved in with the provision of consultancy services such as project management, Design, field inspections, processes improvement, providing project tools and dashboard report, as well as RFP and tendering.
Customers value
Further, quality value comes third in priority, but we are seeing a change in the trend and the customers’ objective of the year 2016. Thus, we have added additional 25% consultancy resources recently to improve on the field inspection currently residing with our customer. That is because quality is related to everything we provide to our customers and here are some of the key areas and their related quality:
The project reports that the product we deliver to our customers have to meet certain quality expectation. They should have accurate data, market benchmark as a reference to what we recommend, and standard visualization.
The execution of a live network upgrade or life traffic migration from an old network node to a new node must meet the expected quality of work regarding minimum outage time, 100% of service restoration after the downtime and provision of a report on the work done following the standard procedures as well as providing a checklist.
Assuring that the installed hardware and cabling meets the operator’s quality standards through field inspection and provision of site inspection reports addressing the quality level for accepted items and the not accepted ones.
Fourthly, our customer values the flexibility which is reflected in attending to their needs for issues that may go beyond our scope, working beyond normal working hours to complete the urgent task, and putting the interest to meeting their requirement before ours. Also, although we have an agreed charge on our resources such as time and materials, our customer requests a slight discount on the total budget every year which we consider in light of the flexibility value.
Performance alignment with the customer values and organization strategy
In general, we are aligned with most of our customer’s values and organization strategy. As exhibited in figure 1.2, we perceived that we can be rated seven out of ten for the greatest value for our customer which is the dependability. However, although there was a significant improvement in 2015 compared to 2014, we are targeting to improve it to nine out of ten in 2016. That will be mainly by improving and minimizing the waste in the projects’ process. Further, speed, flexibility, and cost are part of the current position and future target; hence, we think no further improvement is required. The reason the cost is on the lower scale is due to the customer needs for more discount that we cannot accommodate due to the rising cost of living that directly affects our cost. We also realize that Quality is one main area of improvement for us and our customer. The current quality position is six out of ten in radar scale as shown in figure 1.2. To improve the quality to nine, we have jointly started a new initiative with our customer. The initiative involves quality assurance experts to improve the process and set up field inspection tools that allow inspectors to collect data from sites, highlight/mark violations and deviations as well as track corrective action and allow their supervisors to analyze the data and suggest changes to improve the quality. That is crucial because the lack of field inspection focus and enforcement of quality standards, as well as guidelines, are some of the main reasons of lower quality.
Our organizational strategy that is based on focused, competitive advantage is also aligned with our customer values. In that respect, the Dependability value had improved when we started digitizing our project tracking. The project tracking tool made our project’s stakeholders aware of their related activities and helped them communicate faster with their peers to resolve project issues; which is improving the project delivery time. The digitization has also helped us improve the speed value for our customer by providing faster or current project reports through an online dashboard.
Network Implementation processes values and VSM analysis
We cover a large number of projects, and each project demands its process due to different activities, requirements, and stakeholders. For the VSM exercise, I have selected enterprise business Key Account (KA) customers Held Order (HO) fulfillment because it is the most critical project and the highest valued by our customer. The KA HO project covers all KA customers that need high-speed fiber connection and cannot be covered by the current operator network. That is because it requires network expansion: design, construction, equipment installation, and circuit activation. Figure 1.3 illustrates the high-level end to end process steps for the KAHO process.
Our step by step analysis for the added value will focus on the Network Implementation stage. The Network Implementation stage consists of five steps or activities to complete the cycle for each order and deliver the service to the customer. It is also worth noting that, the stages that are before Network implementation consume around 90 days of non-value added time to the customer order. However, as this analysis is focused on the Network implementation stage, it will not be covered in the detailed analysis.
Step 1: Assign Held Order to the contractor
Step 1 is preceded by 15 days wait time required for customer data and service verification. Step one requires one day to process the hold order and package the HO with the necessary information and instruction and assign to the contractor. The analysis revealed that an additional average of 10 days of waste is reported before the contractor receives the work order package of the HO. That is mainly due to delay in preparing the package by the document control center as the contractor resources are tied up with other load and not ready to travel back from the work sites, or cannot commit to additional scope.
Step 2: Field Survey and Design
In step 2, the contractor conducts a field survey to assure the accuracy of the provided data and reflect its survey result on the network design system for the designer to work on the current network. The designer, based on the required services for the customer, updates the change in the network diagram and adds required elements to implement the solution. Thus, step 2 takes in total two days. On the other hand, the contractor takes additional five days to deliver the design package for approval because operator resources are busy with another load and cannot take more load or the contractor could not process the design fast enough due to the far customer location. In that view, step 2 has a defect or failure rate of 50%, according to the findings that come from the survey. The findings are additional requirements not considered in the initial cost estimation, customer location was not matching the fact that the customer is not interested in the services anymore, and jobs cannot be implemented (owner canceled the order, forbidden area, etc).
Step 3: design approval
In step 3, the operator approves the design document technically and financially and the approval process takes one day. However, it takes an additional average of 10 days for the contractor to start the implementation. The delay is caused either by the delay in approval or because the contractor has its resource occupied.
Step 4: implement the design work order
In this stage, the contractor carries on the needed preparation, secures the materials to implement the design scope. Step 4 requires around five days to complete and to be handed over to the activation circuit team in the sales department. Also, after the step, there is 10-day wait time on average before the next step starts. That is mainly due to non-availability of resources for the activation service team to start the activities, or the customer is not reachable to schedule the indoor wiring and cabling.
Step 5: Connect Service to Customer
In steps five, the activation service team in sales coordinates with the client and carries on the needed internal wiring installs Modem devices and powers it up in addition to testing the circuits. See Figure 1.4 for all steps.
Recommendation for waste enhancing
Looking at the data in figure 1.4 and after excluding the 90 days for the pre-implementation stage, the customer experience days reaches 60; of which 50 days is a waste time and ten days or 16.7% are customer added value time. The 83.3% of waste time created six Kaizen opportunities as shown in figure 1.4. The first one before step one was due to the Muda of correction resulting from inaccurate data exchanging the steps. That can be fixed by shifting the survey from step two and placing it before step one. The positioning of the survey before step one will provide additional value that will save the 50% time waste in the design and ten days’ waste between step one with reporting of the finding early and before taking any action. Further, the ten days’ waste at step two might be due to over processing of reprinting standards and specification documents that can be made available one time or online. Also, by moving online communication, the order information exchange will eliminate the possibility of late collection of the work orders due to traveling. That will remove the Muda of Motion. The remaining three steps waste time is mainly related to the unevenness balance of the load between the steps or overburden of the resources like in step 4.
Appendices
Figure 1.2
Figure 1.3
Figure 1.4
