Six Sigma SIPOC Meeting #1

OK let me deviate from the regular technical tips and instead talk about our new Six Sigma Project, the goal of which is to reduce the number of billing errors and thus minimize potential write-offs. Today marked our first team meeting. Our objective was to map out the SIPOC (Supplier Input Process Output Customer). Basically this means that we mapped out our current billing process as is. Then we flagged Processes that have a validation procedure associated to them. Then for each of the Processes we flagged, we went back and identified the respective Supplier, the Input, and the Customer. As an example, let’s consider the process of “creating an EDI billing file”. The supplier for this process turns out to be PeopleSoft, the Input turned out to be a Query in PeopleSoft and the Customer turned out to be our Systems Group. The supplier is where we get the Input for the Process, the Input is the Query that is run in PeopleSoft, which produces the data that is funneled into the process called “creating an EDI billing file” and our Customer, is the Systems Group because we send the file to them and they take care of delivering the file to the “real customer”—the one that is really going to pay the bills.