Charles Loew and his consultants from Motorola provided a solid foundation for the quality initiative launched at Citibank in 1987. They assisted Citibank in three ways:
- by positioning the quality initiative with senior management through presentations and training;
- incorporating Six SigmaŽ and quality concepts into the introductory training program delivered to 87,000 employees;
- training facilitators and facilitating teams in a powerful business process redesign methodology.
This redesign method, Cross-functional Process Mapping, for which I was responsible, was used to train over three hundred facilitators worldwide and reaped benefits exceeding $200 million. The processes addressed by these teams regularly decreased end-to-end cycle times two to five times and customer-visible defects three to eight times. These projects, generally, were not heavily IT-enabled, used existing budget, and were completed in four to ten months. As an improvement methodology, it complemented our smaller, continuous improvement efforts. It proved -- and proves to be -- a flexible approach for process improvement when significant, but not radical, change is needed for processes crossing multiple functions or organizations.
Dennis Percher, V.P.
Citibank Corporate Quality Office
