Our experience teaching lean at SulAmérica
The resolution to start working with lean thinking and practice at SulAmérica was a top-down decision. It was part of the company's strategy to create more value for customers with our products and services and to establish a single process for all business units. SulAmérica's challenge was to create more synergies within its departments.
To begin our journey, we relied on the support of Lean Institute Brasil, which helped us spread lean theory in the company and offered hands-on training to our employees.
Our lean efforts began in the automotive segment, partly because we saw many opportunities to reduce our administrative expenses, which accounted for 14% of all our spending. The first step in the project was to map the value stream of the automotive processes and focus on three activities in particular – policy issuance, claims and payment to repair shops. The payment project had a smaller scope, but we found it would allow us to get quick results so we could more easily assess the role lean could play in the company, which was confirmed by the fact that we exceeded the A3 targets just three months after the start of implementation.
The second project, and also the more challenging one, involved redesigning the claims adjustment process at our automotive centers located in 35 different branches spread across the country, which became the focus of SulAmérica's most successful A3. It took six months for people to agree to the changes, but eventually we identified two branches where we could run a pilot project. Three months later, the results of our experiment came in, and everyone quickly asked to switch to the new model. That was our best business case for lean thinking.
At the time, our focus was on engaging cross-functional teams in VSM and in writing an A3 for each process we were trying to improve. As a lean team, our approach was very hands-on: we were involved in every project that was launched, from planning through to the reporting stages. In order to prove the value of using the lean methodology, all results were reported monthly to the COO and quarterly to the company's board.
As part of the review of our own process (using a value stream map), we created standardized work to encourage leaders and sponsors to take more responsibility for the improvements and results they achieved. The leader became responsible for obtaining the A3 results and reporting them monthly to the sponsor and to the lean team. We also created a clear meeting schedule and better defined everyone's roles and responsibilities. Everything was presented, discussed and agreed with the leader and sponsor before starting any A3 project. These simple measures had a tremendous impact. The lean team stopped simply doing project management and began generating real learning opportunities for the SulAmérica team. At the same time, we changed the A3 review system: previously, they were only shown to sponsors at the end of the improvement cycle, without giving them the chance to absorb the information and discuss it with the A3 owner. We created a new standard asking the leader to show the left side of the A3 to the sponsor before starting work on the right side, which led to better expectation-setting and better communication between key people (front line and management), without us having to act as the go-between. In turn, this freed up a lot of our time, allowing us to concentrate on more improvements.
After three years on this journey, we created a model line in our automotive department. To teach the people working on the model line, many theoretical concepts were implemented over eight months. We worked hard, but not everyone accepted the lean ideas right away (everything was pre-programmed at the time, with large batches of theory instead of the right knowledge delivered to the right people at the right time). But it was still important for us in the lean office to go through this process, because it helped us see the potential of lean for our organization and figure out which changes we had to bring to which areas, based on the needs people were expressing . Eventually, the tools we introduced became more useful, and people began to adopt them, which greatly accelerated our progress.
This year, we started a second model line in our health department, but we are using a more immersive approach, less based on scripts and fueled by the teams' real needs. We have incorporated the five guiding principles identified in a recent article written by the Lean Healthcare Initiative of the Lean Global Network as the key to accelerating a lean transformation. We hope this new model line approach will help us accelerate and sustain change in the health departments. So far, these areas have implemented only a few of the lean concepts (mainly A3 and Daily Management).
Over the years, our discussions with the management and lean teams increasingly focused on the idea of creating a lean management system at SulAmérica. We didn't know exactly what that meant until we heard a presentation by Dr. Carlos Frederico Pinto, of the Instituto de Oncologia do Vale, at our first Lean Day. It was a big surprise, and it convinced our COO to give the green light. Critically, at that moment, he decided to involve the Human Resources department (he understood that this had to do with the entire company culture, not just with one area's process) to facilitate the spread of this and other lean practices at SulAmérica. It worked, and lean is now being spread to different areas of the company. In particular, this meant teaching the Lean Transformation Framework to the leadership team and bringing the A3 to everyone else.
The main problem we are facing now is that some areas are using only one or two lean tools in a disconnected way. For example, A3 thinking and Daily Management are being used in many areas, but depending on where you go, teams tend to use one or the other. When they use both, these tools are not necessarily connected. That was our fault, actually: when we started the repair shop payments project, Daily Management was used to improve capacity, not as a problem-solving system. The yokoten we did after that ended up “selling” the same approach to the whole company. So now we are trying to better articulate and connect Daily Management with problem solving. Elsewhere, our success with the A3 (attributed in part to the fact that we were able to gamify our A3 course) has become a problem, because everyone wants to do it, but sometimes they fail to understand that there is more to lean thinking than just the A3.
Hoshin kanri, in which many people at SulAmérica are involved, has had an incredibly positive effect on our work. Since we introduced it, we have seen people from different areas discussing the same problems and starting to collaborate to solve them. Although, frustratingly, many of them still do not associate hoshin with our lean journey, it has undoubtedly made a great contribution to it. Hoshin represents the link between the many projects we have launched in the business and our common vision and goals. It allows us to bring together the different pieces of our journey and gets everyone moving in the same direction.
THE BIGGEST LESSONS WE HAVE LEARNED
First, one of the most important things we learned on our journey was that making lean engaging, and even fun, is critical to success. We saw this with A3 thinking, for example: it takes time to master the art of the A3, but we found that introducing our competition and turning problem solving into a game got people excited and, as a consequence, improved the quality of the A3s they prepared.
Second, we learned the importance of sharing knowledge (yokoten), especially at the gemba. Showing SulAmérica people real-life examples at the gemba during training really helped them connect what they saw with the problems they faced in their own workplaces.
Third, we learned early on that a lean transformation requires people to take responsibility and make it a reality. Our lean team's goal is to turn people into independent improvers and problem solvers. In the automotive segment we have achieved this, but we still have a lot of work to do in the other departments.
In fact, when we started spreading lean thinking across the company, its sustainability became a concern. To address this, with the help of Lean Institute Brasil, we recently introduced a new assessment tool based on the Lean Transformation Framework for those areas engaged in deeper experimentation. We have found it extremely useful for understanding the next step we need to take in each of these areas. More importantly, we involve the area managers in these conversations, hoping to make them independent and get them to take charge. In the future, this tool may be the last step before we pass the torch to our managers, to ensure they share the same vision and can pick up where we left off.
