The new shareholder of a consumer credit company proposed a really ambitious industrial plan consisting of reducing operational costs by 100 million € and multiplying profitability by 4 in 3 years. The company chose to deploy lean within their core business process to ensure high return on investment in a very short period of time.

In 18 months, 20 projects, distributed over 5 different agencies, were successfully carried out, with the close guidance of 2 Operae coaches. 220 collaborators acquired a lean experience. 1 internal coach and 8 new project leaders received extensive lean training and became autonomous lean agents. 1 program assistant managed the deployment plan, and designed and validated project goals and ROI with the Finance department. Finally, a lean knowledge base and document repository were created by the newly trained lean team.

A new product, aimed at reducing customers’ wait time, emerged from this lean deployment program. The goal was to provide the walk-in customer with a new approved loan (and cash on their account) within 15 minutes of their arrival, as opposed to the 4 days and 2 visits it normally took. The best competitor on the market did the same thing in no less than 15 days. The sales director became aware that handling a loan request should normally take 15 minutes and anything out of this range was a problem that needed to be tackled using lean.