Analysis Airborne

Deutsche Synpnosis

Deutsche Allgegeinversicherung, the second largest insurance firm in Germany, had decided to adopt a new quality improvement initiative: PMV in order to maintain its prominent position due to the looming competition and increasingly customer demands.

Kluck, the architect behind Prozessmessung und Verbesserung, was head of Operation Development at Deutsche Allgemeinversicherung(DAV). The PMV project was a revolutionary effort to use manufacturing-style improvement techniques in insurance services, it will differentiate DAV in the industry and hopefully, maintain its prominent position. Kluck, however, was facing a number of difficult problems with the improvement phase of the project.

Priot to 1994, correct transcription from forms had been assured using a method called Double -key entry. There were two problems with this method of assuring accuracy. First, it was very expensive, since it essentially demanded that work be done twice. Second, it was found that first-pass quality actually deteriorated over time when the double-key method was used.

To begin to find out what accuracy levels were like throughout DAV, Kolb and Kluck selected New Policy Set-up as a pilot measurement project. The plan was to take a sample of the work carried out by the associates, and use that sample to infer what the general accuracy rate was in the New Policy Set-up process.

To carry out the experiment, Kluck decided to use SPC which had traditionally been used for continuous variables such as the diameter of a piston. According the SPC practice in manufacturing in manufacturing, a different kind of chart called a p-chart is used. In such a process, a person would measure five components every few hours, and mark the sample average and range of the measurement on the chart. In the case of New Policy Set-up at DAV, group should sample each other's work at the end of every day.

The first two months of each team's project had been devoted to charting data,...