At Customer, For Customer

Taking Six Sigma to the Customer.

Six Sigma is our commitment to quality, the roadmap to customer delight, and a philosophy that is part of our business culture. We embrace Six Sigma’s customer-focused, data-driven philosophy and apply it to everything we do. We are building on these successes by sharing best practices across all of our businesses, putting the full power of GE behind our quest for better, faster customer solutions.

Our ACFC (`At Customer, For Customer’) initiative is one such endeavour to take Six Sigma to our customers. To date, 45 ACFC Projects have been completed across the country, which brought clinical excellence, patient comfort and economic value add to our customers.

Manipal Hospital, Bangalore chose an area that impacts the largest number of patients : Registration. A team of Manipal and GE associates successfully identified the causes for delay and variation, and reduced the wait times by over 50% to less than 5 minutes.

Often, our view is based on averages. Customers don’t judge us on averages but they feel the variance in each transaction. Six Sigma focuses first on reducing process variation and then on improving the process capability. Customers value consistent, predictable processes that deliver results.

At Mallya Hospital, Bangalore average in-patient discharge and billing time was reduced by over 67% and variation reduced by 86%, improving patient comfort and satisfaction.

At Batra Hospital, New Delhi, the radiology department could reduce the turn around time to deliver their X-ray reports by over 65% in a high volume (120 scans/day) environment saving over Rs. 2 lacs per annum. The success was repeated in Ultrasound reporting too.

Bombay Port Trust Hospital could increase the patient throughput at their stress test center when the cycle time reduced by over 70%.

“Reducing Variation between Actual Start and Scheduled Start time for coronary procedures” was the theme at The Heart Center, Bangalore. Streamlining the day care patient scheduling reduced such variances by over 50%.

Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai could not just reduce MR Scan cycle time by over 50%, but also increased throughput and equipment utilization through simultaneous filming with GE’s Advantage WindowsTM.

Making internal customers happy was the theme at Wockhardt, Bangalore. They improved service levels of their engineering department.
Projects at Chandan Diagnostics, Lucknow and Shubham Diagnostics, Gorakhpur are examples where Six Sigma helped our customers in Business Development. Surveys with referring physicians helped them add new range of 2D/3D applications to their portfolio of services. Through new Marketing brochures and tools, they could extend their geographic reach. New, Optimized Scan protocols helped them reduce film costs, and improve capacity utilization and thus profitability.

At Bombay Hospital, the challenge was to reduce frequent breakdowns and `down time’ of syringe pumps. Such downtimes could even exceed 3,000 hours. The project reduced `Elapsed Time to Repair’ to less than 24 hours.

GE Engineers listen to the `Voice of the Customer’ interacting directly with radiologists and physicians, build their specific needs right into the new products in the making of our labs.

ACFC project with Dr. Ashraf at CRAFT (Center for Research in Assisted Fertilization Techniques) is helping us build a quantitative diagnostic decision aid to study fibroids in uterine pathology better.

Inputs from Bowring Hospital, Bangalore is helping us build Computer Based Training Tools for the new Sonologist. With inputs from Dr. Ramamurthy at Bangalore Diagnostic Center, our Clinical Applications Research group could develop new software algorithms for offline enhancement of Ultrasound Images. Customer specified tuning parameters render high quality images providing contrast resolution, cystic clarity, edge clarity and texture characteristics suppressing artifacts.

With inputs from Dr. Uday Patil at Manipal Hospital, Bangalore, research on Automated Intermodal Image registration helps us progress on multi modality image fusion applications where both accuracy and speed are critical. Another project helped develop new MR Plus Sequences that help optimal imaging of the intra-auditory canal fluid and cranial nerves in the cerebello-pontine angle in the shortest time, with highest Image Quality.

Above are examples of Six Sigma delivering at customer site clinical excellence, patient comfort and economic value.