"Six Sigma... at a Bank?"
ASQ Six Sigma Forum Magazine
February 2004, pp. 13-17
In 2001, the top executives of Bank of America decided that their company "needed a more rigorous, disciplined and comprehensive approach to process improvement and decided to adopt a quality program based on Six Sigma." The CEO and the rest of the company's top ten officers were required to lead Six sigma projects. At the same time, senior Six Sigma professionals were recruited from companies such as General Electric, Honeywell, and Motorola. The hoshin kanri planning process was also adopted.
More than three dozen Six Sigma projects concentrated on ATM system failures. As a result, overall defects across electronic channels were reduced by 88%.
Though the first Six Sigma projects focused on traditional operations-oriented applications, such as reducing errors and late entries, Bank of America quickly expanded outside of operational areas to customer issues, improving sales processes, reducing fraud, and even opening new facilities. The Six Sigma process became embedded in the culture of Bank of America. For the past two years, key vendors have been required to use Six Sigma methods, and now they are also required to participate in the Bank of America's own Six Sigma training programs.
Among the successful results so far are a 36% improvement in same day payments and a 47% improvement in deposit processing. Measures of "customer delight" have increased by 25%. Taken as a whole, it is estimated that the use of Six Sigma and other quality tools has created benefits of more than $2 billion since 2001.
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