"The role of quality is to improve the customer experience, not to cut costs" - Interview with Roger Cliffe

Roger Cliffe

Roger joined Vodafone in 2002. His previous work in Quality Improvement covers the financial services, steel, aerospace and chemical industries in the USA, Japan and Europe. He is a frequent speaker at international Quality Conferences. He is a fellow of the IQA, has been a Senior Assessor for the European and British Quality Awards for 10 years and a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He is also a member of the Board of the British Quality Foundation and Midlands Excellence.

He is a keen long distance cyclist, has a wife, three children and a classic car and now lives in Solihull.

_________________________________

What does Six Sigma mean to Vodafone?

Do you think you would have achieved what you have without Six Sigma?

_________________________________

What does Six Sigma mean to Vodafone?

Six Sigma is the internal brand which we use for all of our business improvement activities. It contains the standard Six Sigma methodology, structure, governance, disciplines, and competencies, but we also use elements of Lean, Kaizen, Process Improvement and Process Management.

As an organisation, we have been doing Six Sigma now for about 2 and a half years, UK Wide. These business and process improvement methods are being extended across the entire company.

What led you to Six Sigma?

We thought long and hard about the style and the approach to business improvement as well as how we would brand it, and how we would govern it. We did some pilot work using some Black Belts; not a full programme, but some projects using the Six Sigma methodology were introduced into one of our Business Units. Six Sigma was attractive to us because it enabled us to hit the key parts of the process with laser sharp attention and we produced some real and actual results.

Things that matter to an organisation such as Vodafone are how to get tangible, pragmatic results that really have a bearing on the way the business operates. The organisation has little patience for long term culture change initiatives that don’t really yield any benefits to the bottom line. Of course, we have had a cultural change as a result of Six Sigma but the main reason for adopting it is simply that it is a better way of doing business improvement than we had ever been able to do before. That’s the main driver – the fact that its tangible, focussed and disciplined which is what Vodafone really needed.

Given that there hasn’t been this kind of initiative before at Vodafone, what challenges have you faced in implementing Six Sigma?

The reason that there hasn’t been anything like this before is that Vodafone as an organisation has been changing and evolving so rapidly, with new products, new services, whole new technologies put in place in a relatively short space of time. The pace of change is phenomenal. So in the organisation there have been reservations about putting anything in that might slow that development cycle and process. In reality, doing Six Sigma properly will actually improve your time to market, so it’s the type of approach which we thought would best match our organisation.

Vodafone has historically harvested a relatively immature process environment, in comparison to other large manufacturing companies. We have ISO 9000: 2000 and initiatives to meet those requirements, but we hadn’t really got a systematic method for improving our business. Process improvement was previously unstructured, but now Six Sigma has added that structure, and it really has given us some spectacular results over the last 2 years. We are getting financial benefits of over half a million per Black Belt project, so we are getting some really spectacular savings. As a result, we are looking now at building up the number of Black Belts to 80, with 350 to 400 Green Belts.

We target five projects in two years per Black Belt. The first project a Black Belt does is called a nursery project, and is always a single project. Thereafter black belts are allowed to do more than one project at a time. They also supervise GB projects and they run WOW (War on Waste) workshops, which are our version of GE Workout processes.

The approach is quite different, because in other environments you face a mine field left by previous improvement initiatives. Here it was virgin territory. New staff coming in tend to have quite different experiences of Six Sigma and process improvement, so with only second hand experience it has actually been quite a bit easier to deal with and implement than in other areas.

The challenge with Vodafone is that we have to be able to work really quickly. We very quickly modified the programme to enable short deployment phases, allowing us to get things in, get them done and then think about the next phase, rather than have very long periods of time go past. In the 3 years since I have been at Vodafone, we’ve had 4 CEOs, who have all been very supportive, but have all needed a restart of what Six Sigma is and what their role is going to be. In fact, most of the top team have moved to other parts of the business, and that change has been quite difficult to manage. The stakeholder part has been really quite challenging.

Are Senior Management all trained and certified?

All Senior Management have gone through champion training and we’re just about to launch the next wave. Some have had one-to-one coaching. We don’t make it a requirement as yet for progression as GE and other people do, but that may change. People turn up to our champion meetings at Vodafone because it’s important to the business, not simply because they’ve been told to do it. If we can’t make the case for it being important then perhaps we’ve got the wrong case.

We have a tracking system so I know every week the stage of all of the Black Belt projects and most of the Green Belt projects. This was initially in-house , but we are just switching over to iNexus which will give us a much better functionality. It enables greater tracking and reporting, and feedback on how the Master Black Belts are coaching the Black Belts: the MBBs are accountable for the progress of the BBs so it’s a fairly well structured system. We then review on a weekly basis what the progress is and where the issues are. On all of the Six Sigma programmes we have a monthly, more strategic review and we have an annual review of the overall process. From that feedback, we have changed the process quite dramatically. We have changed the training, the material, the way we supervise people and the way we organise ourselves.

This tracking process is extremely important to Vodafone. Without the tracking, we wouldn’t be able to see the benefits. The only benefits we claim are those which have been signed off by finance, if they are financial ones, or those signed off by the customer experience committee for customer related Benefits.

The only benefits we track are those which appear in the budgets, if they are not in the budget we don’t track them! There is sufficient understanding now, that we are getting a lot of benefit from our Six Sigma projects so we don’t have to prove that anymore. As I said previously, we are seeing over half a million benefits from each project on average so there is no question over the value that the Six Sigma teams are adding to the business.

We are however always looking at other ways of measuring the benefits to try and take the emphasis away from just a financial measurement, and we are now finding there’s a request for Black Belts to work on infrastructural projects as part of the planning process. It’s very difficult to show real benefits from that, but it is nevertheless an important factor to consider, so we try to look for methods and measures of soft benefits, and an improved customer experience.

When I first came to Vodafone, they made it very clear to me that the role of quality was to improve the customer experience, not to cut costs.

Have attitudes changed as the programme has matured?

Not markedly. As we have grown and become more mature as a Six Sigma business there has been a shift more towards focussing on the financial benefits, but the emphasis on the customer experience remains stronger than ever, so there has been more emphasis on measuring the customer experience than when we first started. We didn’t have the measures in place before, but now we have a whole range of them.

Our Customer Delight Index system was introduced as part of an overall global business improvement programme. We don’t tend to worry about who does what, or what we call it. Within the Voice of the Customer work we have fairly comprehensive measures of what our customers think about us. We have a quarterly measure of ourselves versus the competition, we have monthly flash results, and we now have new set of measures which are called Customer Quality Index which act leading indicators of those. Measurements are taken from customers after they have had a particular experience with Vodafone - for example, just after they have purchased a new handset in a store, had a car kit installed, replacement handset.

What is the Certification process?

We have a formal process of GB and BB certification and have just certified our first BBs on their 2 year anniversary. They have to complete at least 5 major number of projects, and demonstrated knowledge of the tools and techniques in addition to having demonstrated that they have made a significant contribution to the business. BBs also sit an exam and undergo a viva where they go through their projects in detail, before they become certified.

How are you communicating the change progress?

We engaged our internal communications department when we first started. They put together the communication and made sure it fitted with the strategic objectives so it was part of the strategic plan. We have large annual events, quarterly updates covering what we are doing and the issues that are being faced. Monthly updates are essentially briefings, we have magazines where we have examples of successful BB projects, intranet information updates which we use regularly to update staff. In addition to that we have a Six Sigma Forum, which are large events – several hundred people attend. We have wall walks of the projects we have and quarterly BB forums which go into more detail about the application of tools and techniques. All of these are vehicles for communicating both upwards and downwards.

What challenges have you faced in implementing Design for Six Sigma at Vodafone?

We have some DfSS projects – we run separate DfSS courses for our key BB population. We have had two or three major DfSS projects which have revealed quite spectacular results: part of the NPD process where they reduced the time to market down from 18 months down to 8 weeks, just using simple DfSS principles including Voice of the Customer and QFD tools. Other examples are where we have looked at new products and new process designs and again shown some really quite spectacular improvements.

The challenges we have with the DfSS is that we don’t really have as many BBs that are capable of driving DfSS projects. It is a particular skill and we don’t have that competence at the moment. We should be doing much, much more of it, as it is classic prevention activity. If we could focus more on DfSS we would have fewer problems to clear up with DMAIC at the other end. Every DfSS project will save us 10 DMAIC projects at the other end so the more of that we can do the better.

DfSS requires better influencing skills and you need to have people who are able to deal with ambiguity in a more effective way than BBs would need to do in a DMAIC cycle. The DMAIC processes and projects are pretty well structured with a fairly standard template. This standard template and approach isn’t available for DfSS as its too difficult to do as there each one is different in new product design and new process design. Having DfSS experience in transactional environments is also a lot harder to come by.

Does your Business Improvement strategy include Lean?

We have introduced some Lean work into the Six Sigma Training for Black Belts, such as value stream mapping, types of waste etc, just some of the basic concepts We are entering the next phase of Six Sigma which is focussed much more on End-to-End process improvement and Lean techniques will have a bigger part to play there.

However, the War on Waste (WOW) work we do is probably more akin to Kaizen activity. The Kaizen Blitz type work has been a good place for us to focus, because whereas the Six Sigma work is incredibly effective at what it does, it does take a long time. Why does it take us 3-6 months to finish a BB project? Because it does. Without breaking the golden rules of what makes Six Sigma successful, there are a lot of things we can still do to speed the process up.

Are these WOWs a source of BB projects?

There are a number of sources for GB, BB and JDI projects. We have Customer Experience Measures (Voice of the Customer). There’s the Voice of the Process work where we will have identified weaknesses or ineffectiveness in the process. We also have the voice of the employee and we have a programme called “My Ideas” which again has been introduced as part of the Six Sigma programme: if people can’t resolve an issue themselves then they will raise an idea either as a team idea, individually or through campaigns which collect all ideas on specific topics. These are all sources for potential improvement projects, some of which will be BBs, GBs, JDI or WOW workshops.

What’s Next?

We are expanding the current activity: it has taken us a while to get the right governance structure and we want to build on that, not take it to pieces. We will increase the number of BBs the number of belts in general, and grow the types of projects we’re working on, so we are working on even more important projects than we have been to-date.

The second thing we’re doing is to really enhance, the end-to-end process improvement. We’ll be looking at Lean type activities, as well as looking at process re-engineering on the big end-to-end processes. We see that as an extension of our Six Sigma programme. The danger would be if we did it and called it something different, at the moment we call it all Six Sigma.

So the next step is getting much higher levels of process ownership in the business and starting to manage a lot more around process. It’s a lot of work.

Do you think you would have achieved what you have without Six Sigma?

We always say it’s about the skill, the will and the opportunity: Six Sigma is about bringing all of those three things together. To commit a crime you need a weapon, a motive and an opportunity. Similarly, to make process improvement stick (and in some organisations improvement is seen as a crime!!!) you need the Skills(weapon), you need an the will(motive) and the opportunity. For this to work, all three need to be firmly in place. The mistake is to think that you can achieve the same with only two of those in place. There have been instances in parts of the business where we haven’t had the opportunity (i.e. the governance) set up and we haven’t had the benefits – even when we have had the skill and the will. Equally we haven’t had the skills in place in some parts of the business to achieve what we have; Six Sigma has given us all of those.

Would we have achieved our business results without 6 Sigma? Absolutely not. Six Sigma for us is about a structured systematic approach and we would not have the results we have today without it. In Vodafone there is a very highly skilled workforce who are also very highly motivated, and even with all of that enthusiasm and skill, I don’t believe we would have been able to achieve our current results without Six Sigma.