Lean Part 1 - On Lean's Waste Thinking in the financial industry

Lean is a nice framework to use to assess processes and redesign them...
One of the area's in which Lean shines, is the concept of waste: everything which is not supporting value in the process, towards customer and towards business.
If you apply this concept to typical data processing in financial service industry area's (such as insurance - claims, quotes, etc), you can see that some of the current industry practices can be done much more efficient...

Let's take an insurance company, and a request for a new insurance.

Let's start with a waste: Defects (e.g. a product has been produced partly or completely, but turns out to be defect, which means that the next step in the process can not continue and rework is needed).
Does this happen in our process? Yep...
- Supplied information by customer or agent is incorrect
- Supplied information by customer or agent is incomplete
- Customer request is being processed, but insurance company finds out that request is not within company policy
- Customer request is being processed, but insurance company finds out that request is not within company policy
- Customer request is being processed, but insurance company finds out that request is not within legal constraints
- Information stored or created by insurance company is incorrect
- Output created by insurance company is incorrect
- Output created by insurance company is correct, but not understandable by customer (Ouch! Know that one??)

Interesting enough - if you talk to the business of a company, these situations are very common. But then, if you ask them if these situations are TRACKED, the answer is usually no...
Ouch.... defects, but no clue on frequency, impact, cost, cause, structural fix/avoidance...
The second painpoint is the reaction to a situation. Typically an expensive employee (more experienced) will need to take a look, check, and correct. Expensive stuff. Again and again.

So, why not create the following business rules in every BPM process:
1. If a defect (situation above) is detected, the normal handler employee STOPs the process, records the event, and hands over the issue to a ERROR queue (with a seperate team), then continues on the next customer request. This keeps the normal FLOW going.
2. The error team analyses the situation, corrects the situation, if possible, or stops it. If corrected, the request is rerouted into the normal flow again
3. KPI's are defined on the error situations, measured and evaluated
4. Periodically, trend analysis and problem-cause analysis is done. Corrective actions are taken, to prevent or reduce situations from happening.

Process maturity starts with acknowledging wastes, including defects...