10% of a large B2B businesses' invoices were being queried by key customers before payment, driving up process cost and negatively impacting cashflow.
On a Process Behaviour Chart, to understand if the problem was systemic. The way the problem manifests (systemically or not) determines the most efficient and effective improvement approach to adopt.
Using a fishbone diagram, to highlight the key presenting causes.
Using 5 Why's Analysis, to find the real root causes. By correlating them to the problem to ensure proven causality, when we solutionised we were confident of success.
We adopted the solution and continued adding data to the Process Behaviour Chart established in Step 1., to ensure changes were effective, and sustained.
Queried invoice volumes dropped from 10% to below 5%, a 50%+ reduction!
