Using Six Sigma DMAIC to improve credit initiation process in financial services operation Define: This project will

focus on the process steps involved in the underwriting of mid-market customers by the Credit Initiation Team in the PSUD (Payment Systems Underwriting Division). The scope of the process analysis will begin at the end of the Regional Sales Managers sales process, when he or she will have the customer submit an application for a PSD program. The process will be analysed through the point where the credit decision is reported back to the customer. Steps taken by the regional sales manager, the Credit Initiation Team and members of both teams administration will be analysed. Measure: A process ow chart should be constructed for the company to illustrate the steps of the current credit approval process. In addition, several months of historical data needs to be collected on the process through a database that monitors progress of the Credit Initiation Team (CI Database). The data collected ranges from how many days it took to complete each step in the process to who was involved with each step. All Mid-Market requests need to be examined to determine the length of time to approve each credit request. Analyse: The data for the total number of midmarket credit requests approved in the given period is obtained. The requests generally come from entities of all different types of industries. Overall, the data analysis might show several areas in need of improvement. Since the goal of the project is to reduce the number of days for a credit to be approved to some target value, the average amount of time it historically takes to approve a request is examined. Once it is established that a large percentage of the population of requests takes longer than the average, further analysis is necessary to determine the causes of the delays. The Cause and Effect Diagram can be utilized to illustrate a number of the potential causes of credit request approvals taking more than the required number of days to be contingently approved. Further statistical analysis is needed to show which of the inputs (Sales, underwriting, and Approval) is the biggest contributor to the delays.

Improve: After analyzing the data, it might become clear that which of the three areas of the process are in need of improvement; the sales team, the approval stage or the underwriting stage. Each of the areas might have failures that lead to slow-downs in the process. These failures can be identied in the cause and effect diagrams. In this section, the failures will be outlined and process changes and/or pokayokes will be suggested to allow for improvements of suggested areas. Control: Integral to the Six Sigma DMAIC process is the control phase. This portion of the process sets in place a plan to ensure changes and improvements are maintained. It is suggested that the management team meet monthly to review progress and compliance with the changes. Before the management meeting, the credit manager will survey the sales team to get their feedback on issues they are having with the implemented changes. In addition, the credit manager will run a report to compare updated data with the data from this project. Adjustments will be made to the process on an on-going basis.