Tqm Needs Assessment For Quality

TQM NEEDS ASSESMENT FOR QUALITY

TQM Needs Assessment for Quality

Improvement Paper

University of Phoenix

QUALITY MANAGEMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY/ MKT 449

March 7, 2007

Week Four

Needs Assessment for Quality Improvement Paper

Walker Financial Partners is an insurance and financial services organization. Through life insurance, disability insurance, annuities and investments we help both individuals and businesses with retirement planning, estate analysis, executive benefits, risk management, and other financial services. Often, an individual's health and/or financial situation must be evaluated for acceptance before we are able to offer coverage. A portion of this underwriting process takes place in the new business department at our Pasadena office. As our company has grown to over 60 full time agents generating more than 1200 policies per year, our local new business department has experienced difficulty handling the increased volume. We need to revise our current procedures to accommodate our growing organization.

The new business department handles several different things. We direct the initial stages of underwriting, which includes evaluating client for obvious declines, ensuring that all company and state required forms are present and properly completed, ordering medical records, and creating a master file before sending to our Home Office in Massachusetts. In addition to underwriting, we also follow the case through the complete underwriting process in Home Office, providing status to agents and obtaining additional requirements if needed. We also manage all policy owner service (POS) issues such as owner and beneficiary changes, premium payments, and policy inquiries among other service matters.

The problem that new business has encountered is the inability to effectively manage all the different aspects of the business as it grows. There is simply too much work to be handled by the current system. We experience a delay in application processing and the ordering of medical records. We lack the time to perform daily status checks on pending cases. We experience constant interruptions from the telephone or an agent who has come into our office to ask a question. The current average turnaround time from application submission to a policy in the agent's hands is approximately six weeks. We need to cut this time in half, and have a turnaround time of approximately three weeks. This can be accomplished by using the DMAIC Tool.

Having a standard improvement model such DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) is extremely helpful. It can provide our quality team with a roadmap. DMAIC is a structured, disciplined, rigorous approach to process improvement consisting of the five phases mentioned, where each phase is linked logically to the previous phase as well as to the next phase.

Our desire is to appear seamless to the agents because they are our customers. This means that we need to deliver status to an agent before he even thinks about asking. We also need to improve our policy production time, which is the amount of elapsed time from agent submission to the new business department to the time the agent receives a client's policy. The agent should be completely unaware of the strain that we experience.

Not all departments are willing to do a self-evaluation. We are a small organization and therefore, we operate on a much more personal level. Ego and age tend to get in the way of keeping an open mind to change.

One reason that the new business department experiences so many problems is because it does not have a well-defined role within the organization. The department tends to deal with a wide variety of problems that are not necessarily ours to deal with, simply because we tend to have the most knowledge about the products and procedures. Improved instruction of agents by our training department would probably greatly reduce this problem.

The new business department consists of two full time employees and a part time office assistant. We essentially manage ourselves; we have no direct supervisor. We have a hard time agreeing on how and what we should change procedurally. Currently, certain agents are assigned to each of us. We each have our own procedure, and naturally, we believe our way is the better way. I place importance on speed, technology, and agent independence, whereas my co-worker places importance on service and handholding.

We also experience a major problem with change partially due to a major age gap. I am twenty-nine years old. My co-worker is sixty years old who emigrated here from Norway in the 1970's. We quite literally come from two different worlds. For example, I grew up in a virtually paperless world. I believe that everything should be on disk or CD. Paper is simply a waste of space. Instead of making a photocopy of a form, I scan it onto a CD. My co-worker grew up in a world of paper. She also has worked in the insurance industry for many years, and the insurance industry is known for its love of paper. She refuses to switch to electronic forms because she believes