IBM Credit was a wholly owned
subsidiary of IBM responsible for financing mainframe
computers sold by IBM. While some customers bought
mainframes outright or obtained financing from other
sources, financing computers provided significant additional
profit.
When an IBM sales representative made a sale, he
or she would immediately call IBM Credit to obtain a
financing quote. The call was received by a credit officer
who would record the information on a request form. The
form would then be sent to the credit department to check
the customer’s credit status. This information would be
recorded on the form, which was then sent to the business
practices department, which would write a contract
(sometimes reflecting changes requested by the customer).
The form and the contract would then go to the
pricing department, which used the credit information to
establish an interest rate and record it on the form. The
form and contract was then sent to the clerical group,
where an administrator would prepare a cover letter
quoting the interest rate and send the letter and contract
via Federal Express to the customer.
The problem at IBM Credit was a major one. Getting
a financing quote took anywhere from four to eight
days (six days, on average), giving the customer time to
rethink the order or find financing elsewhere. While the
quote was being prepared, sales representatives would
often call to find out where the quote was in the process,
so that they could tell the customer when to expect it.
However, no one at IBM Credit could answer the question,
because the paper forms could be in any department and
it was impossible to locate one without physically walking
through the departments and going through the piles
of forms on everyone’s desk.
IBM Credit examined the process and changed it so
that each credit request was logged into a computer system
so that each department could record an application’s
status as soon as it was completed and sent it to the next
department. In this way, sales representatives could call
the credit office and quickly learn the status of each application.
IBM used some sophisticated management science
queuing theory analysis to balance workloads and staff
across the different departments so that no applications
would be overloaded. They also introduced performance
standards for each department (e.g., the pricing decision
had to be completed within one day after that department
received an application).
However, process times got worse, even though
each department was achieving almost 100 percent compliance
on its performance goals. After some investigation,
managers found that when people got busy, they
conveniently found errors that forced them to return the
credit request to the previous department for correction,
thereby removing it from their time measurements.
QUESTIONS:
What techniques can you use to identify improvements?
Choose one technique and apply it to this situation—
what improvements did you identify?
Source: Reengineering the Corporation, New York: Harper Business,
1993, by M. Hammer and J. Champy