Dramatically Enhancing a Life-Saving Service Installation Process

Personal Emergency Link of Senior Citizen Home Safety Association has been a highly valued service to elderly and chronic invalids in Hong Kong. This service is also directly linked to the association's mission of "Singly not fear, Elderly be cared." However, the installation lead time had deteriorated and only 11% of the in-coming orders could be successfully completed within one week. Most applicants needed to wait for 3 or more weeks before they could use the service.

High Impact had guided a cross-functional project team, which was composed of key persons from involving departments, to improve the operation. We facilitated the team to precisely define the process to work on, and collect and analyse the information relating to the process flow and performance. Within two months, the proposal for the improved process was devised with both the consensus and commitment from all team members.

Results

The bottleneck operation of the process was analysed and resolved. Work was redistributed among the departments. As a result of the project, the process was streamlined and the performance level had been improved to a level of 100% cases successfully installed within one week.

This was particularly enlightening as no addition investment in resources and technology was needed.

In addition to client satisfaction, cooperation among departments had also improved significantly.

N.B. This case has been documented in the VCD of our Process Improvement Self-Learning Kit.