As the leader of a global R&D group of database administrators at Ericson, I tasked myself with changing the two-week delivery time to day delivery of resources in an R&D setting. Our team was responsible for delivering administrative databases to R&D and databases to Ericsson development teams.
To reduce ordering latency, we streamlined the process by reducing the five actors involved from five to just two—the one who orders and the one who fulfills the order. By labeling waste/latency (kaizen: muda) and recognizing low-hanging fruit, we were able to reduce unnecessary costs.
For instance, we proposed that the Ericsson developer teams order a new database without the approval of three managers as it was in the original process and by that, reduced the latency significantly. If the developers need a database, we don’t need extensive tracking; we just need flexibility.
In the initial process, the user had to order on an order portal and then fill out an Excel sheet with additional information. We removed the Excel sheet requirement, thus removing unnecessary work, latency, and end-user frustration.
I documented the process in BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), which helped us get an overview and transform it. The work was done using kaizen, lean, BPMN, and a lot of freehand improvisation.
