Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt

1/2009 – 2/2012

The Global Business Services company is a European financial centre centralizing 19th West, South and North European countries. After reducing the headcount with 600 people (from 800 to 200) all financial processes (Master Data, R2C and A2R) needed to get standardized, paperless and brought to excellent standards.
I was responsible for the development and deployment of a lean culture in the European Financial Shared Service Centre in Prague. To develop this new culture I set up European teams to work out the major goals:
1. R2C :
- % Unapplied cash versus gross AR from 5% to 2%
- % Unapplied cash > 60 days from 20% to 10%
2. Master Data :
- Increase accurate customer and account master data from 80 to 98%
3. A2R :
- Improve Corporate reporting from 85% to 100% accuracy level (on time & correct)
Herewith I will detail what I did for the R2C (Credit Management) area :
I was responsible to get things fixed as soon as possible for the EMEA board.
- We set up a causal monitoring scorecard showing all weak areas in the E2E process of R2C. This clearly showed which of the 19 countries had major unapplied cash. This was brought to weekly scorecard for the close follow up of the weak areas.
- The bank system was not working properly (= not bringing automatically the amounts to the correct accounts). For that 1 IT had to fix the errors one by one.
- JD Edwards was not properly set up for each country also here 1 IT with one person from operations were dedicated to this problem.
- The original split of the customers (ABC customers) was rearranged.
- For France a project for standardization of payment instruments was made to reduce the checks and manual drafts.
- The organization was changed from 2 teams Application & Collection teams to dedicated teams per country.
- A management dashboard was created and monthly discussed with the Global Business Services management and the Country Financial Directors.
- For the countries where the DSO was not decreasing as targeted meetings with the Customer Service & Sales & Marketing were set up to go in depth into the customers and sales strategy.
- The credit management policies were reviewed and brought correctly into the master data; also here a huge standardization within EMEA was made.
- Performance brought to EMEA level per country so that Global Business Services and the countries had same objectives, goals & KPIs.
Results:
% Unapplied cash versus gross AR came to 2% since 02/2010 and never when higher up. For 2012 the target was set to 1%.
The DSO went down for all 19 countries, except for Iberia.