Today, product development and design along with supply chain management and overall cost management, are major challenges impacting the global automotive industry. The emergence of automobile manufacturers in advancing economies such as the BRIC countries, poses a threat to the European and the American automotive industry
The challenge
To stay ahead in this high-pressure global scenario, it is vital to optimize internal IT operations using cost reduction techniques, to enhance customer service. Mindtree partnered with the world’s leading manufacturer of commercial transport solutions, to address specific challenges:
- Process automation: Develop solutions for reducing repetitive processes
- Effective resource time utilization: Enable the technical teams to focus more on core processes
- Overall team productivity improvement: Facilitate the sharing of best practices, knowledge transfers and reduce the dependency on key resources
Our solution
Mindtree conducted Mindtree Value-added Innovation, a half-day workshop leveraging the SCAN-FOCUS-ACT methodology. Our value added framework is designed to deliver open innovation and internal collaboration within teams. It focuses on addressing new generation business challenges for our customers.
The program uses a unique methodology based on an inventive model. It leverages systematic innovation techniques, problem definition and solving approaches to facilitate idea generation. In addition, it helps deliver perceptible outcomes for customers through SCAN-FOCUS-ACT phases.
The SCAN phase was used to address the three primary problem statements. This enabled the team to come up with twenty five innovative ideas. The tools and techniques deployed during the workshop were:
- Value stream mapping for eliminating process wastes.
- TRIZ principles of preliminary action and anti-action, followed by Merge and Segment principles.
The SCAN phase was followed by the FOCUS phase. Our innovation team utilized this session for deploying Idea Ranking (IR) techniques. Each team addressing the specific problem-statement had to present top ideas to advance to the ACT phase.
Key benefits
The teams focused on qualitative improvements, using the following measures:
- Reduced the dependency on key resources, by conducting various knowledge-sharing sessions across the team. Eg. monthly cross domain sessions.
- Measured the effectiveness of reverse Knowledge Transition (KT), after completion of every KT activity
- Adopted a ‘shift left’ based operation to upgrade skills, across all competency levels within the customer enterprise
- Delivered enhanced customer experience through effective collaboration, using our innovative value-added methodology
- Increased the focus on client-centric program management
Business impact
As part of the ACT phase, the IT program manager and the teams implemented the value added ideas, for 3-4 months. This resulted in the following:
- Empowered the process automation to tackle ‘repetitive issues’, resulting in an implemented solution saving of ~687 KSEK per year
- Facilitated effective resource time utilization, saving 134.88 KSEK per year
- Enabled productivity improvement of 500 hrs / year, reducing dependency on key resources
