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Imagine you are a program manager for the U. S. Army in Europe with a service requirement for your program. After determining that the service requirement is valid for your program and for USAREUR, you are ready to request the funding necessary to acquire this service. You contact your resource manager to learn about the funding approval process. Should be a piece of cake, right?
As a result of policy set by the Secretary of the Army, the USAREUR commanding general must personally approve all requests for services: those filled ‘internally’ with civilians and those ‘outsourced’ through other agencies or contractors. But the commanding general is the last in a long line of approving officials and staffs that touch these requests.
The approval process has more than its share of redundancy and complexity, which is why it has become the focus of a Lean Six Sigma team that has spent the last two months dissecting the approval flow from the initiation of a request to when the commanding general’s approval is communicated back to the requestor.
Lean Six Sigma is a business process improvement methodology that the Department of the Army and USAREUR have adopted. The objective of Lean Six Sigma is to eliminate waste and variation from a given process, thereby delivering improved performance, reliability, and value to the final customer. USAREUR officially launched its deployment of Lean Six Sigma in June 2006.
Since then, USAREUR has trained 6 Black Belts and 55 Green Belts. An additional 21 Black Belts completed their training in March. The term ‘Belt’ applies to all participants of Lean Six Sigma training, with colors pertaining to the level of exposure. Black Belt and Green Belt training courses consist of a four-week and two-week curriculum, respectively. Each course is set up to provide one week of training every four weeks. The Belts use the off-weeks from training to work on their process improvement projects, which are identified by Project Sponsors prior to the start of training.
In the case of the funding approval process, a Lean Six Sigma team was tasked to restructure the process of approving outsourced services, intent on reducing its cycle time, complexity and effort. This team consisted of members from the USAREUR Command Group, Headquarters staff sections, the United States Army Contracting Command Europe and the 21st Theater Support Command. A Master Black Belt was also assigned to the project, who mentors team members on the Lean Six Sigma methodology.
The Lean Six Sigma team collected data that represented process performance since August. “Using rather conservative measures, we found that the approval process takes an average of 41 days until it produces the CG’s authorization, although many requests last more than 50 days”, said Lt. Col. Ann Larsen, the project’s assigned Black Belt. Since the funding approval process precedes actual acquisition procedures, this “cycle time” represents a significant obstacle to the requestor.
The team used a Lean Six Sigma technique called Value Stream Mapping to completely disassemble the flow of service requests through its many steps and recorded the action, time and individuals involved at every step. The map allowed the team to carefully analyze and assign values to the separate process steps and provided a strong visual tool for re-designing the process by combining and eliminating steps.
After completing all data collection and measurement, the team decided to increase the pace of the project by shifting into a Rapid Improvement Event, which condenses the Lean Six Sigma methods and project structure into one week. Dedicating their full-time participation for the entire week, the team finished its analysis and began the process re-design. Lean Six Sigma methods provided the team with the data to back up their suggestions for improvement, which are being tested in a set of trial runs following the RIE. If successful, these changes will culminate in USAREUR-wide implementation.
In the end, the success of this project depends on the support of the process owner and stakeholders. Given the combined involvement of commanders, managers and subject matter experts, the project has all the prerequisites for success. With the continued support of these players and the USAREUR Command Group, this project and others that follow will result in economies and efficiencies that improve the way we do business.
To learn more about the Army’s dynamic business process improvement initiative, visit https://www.g8mpb.hqusareur.army.mil/, or contact the Business Practice and Stewardship Team directly at 370-3531, or e-mail LeanSixSigma@eur.army.mil.
