One of the more interesting presentations at the IQPC Mortgage Processing conference in Melbourne on Aug. 28 was by Kerri Gill of CBA. She presented on Lean and Six Sigma as implemented in CBA's CommWay program. As a bit of a Quality Management old-timer (in fact I worked in QA for Comm Bank IT for a while back in the early '90's) the whole presentation was music to my ears. I've always felt that the LIXI message would be much easier to preach if the audience were better educated about best-practice process improvement techniques.
The Japanese pioneered much of what now gets bundled under the "Lean Six Sigma" banner and it literally transformed Japan's place in the world. Yet the American auto giants totally underestimated what Toyota and the like were doing. They were quite certain that they knew how best to make cars and felt they had nothing to fear from all that "TQM" and "kaizen" waffle. It's not hard to see the parallels with lenders wedded to existing loan processing practices so it is refreshing to see an organisation as large as the CBA actively embracing what boils down to evidence-based process improvement.
I'd love to hear from anyone else who's experienced applying Lean Six Sigma or related techniques in financial services. There's certainly plenty of opportunities for improvements.
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