Re-Introducing Wheels Operational Excellence Team

At Wheels, we are constantly assessing our quality and identifying ways to improve. Quality is embedded within our culture with our extreme dedication to client success. Most recently we identified that the PQM, or Process and Quality Management department, name hadn’t grown with the goals and responsibilities of the team and wasn’t immediately recognized by our clients and others outside the Wheels organization.

With this in mind, we assessed numerous alternatives and ultimately landed on Operational Excellence. I’d like to take this opportunity to share a little more about the team and how you can connect with them.

The Operational Excellence team is made up of three functions that all report up through our Director of Operational Excellence Brian Sweeney. These three functions are quality and continuous improvement, analytics and request management.

Here’s some insight into the roles of each group:

Quality & Continuous Improvement

This team is responsible for ensuring we live up to our 360+ Wheels Quality Assurance promise. These team members are assigned to specific Wheels solutions and work with operational leaders to continually improve our services. They leverage data from our client satisfaction surveys, driver surveys, dashboards and internal systems to identify areas for improvement. Team members are trained in Lean, Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) and leverage these approaches to drive quality. Here are a few of their activities:

• Lead DMAIC projects, facilitate kaizen and other opportunity solving events
• Champion daily huddles
• Lead and train others on process documentation and process confirmations
• Spearhead client escalation responses and root-cause analysis
• Process automation

Analytics

The analytics function is composed of data scientists who mine our metrics to provide insightful reports and dashboards. These reports and dashboards are used across the organization to monitor performance and trigger actions. In addition to reporting, this team builds simple applications and administers our client and driver surveys. They work with multiples tools such as:

• Tableau
• SSRS
• SQL
• Access
• Custom Applications

Request Management

This team focuses on enhancing our request management system. Our request management system is used to document client requests as well as facilitate work between our different internal teams. It allows us to manage and measure the quality and timeliness of our responses. It also allows us to streamline processes by leveraging automation and workflows. Some of this teams’ goals include:

• Increasing responsiveness
• Improve internal and external communication
• Streamline internal processes
• Monitor work queues
• Measure performance

Individuals within each of these functions work closely together to ensure that we provide the best possible services to our drivers and our clients.

If you would like to learn more about the team, or collaborate on a continuous improvement project, please reach out to Brian Sweeney at [email protected] or me at [email protected].