Streamline

 
 
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Procurement process improvement

Due to the pandemic, physical procurement processes transitioned to digital overnight and the current weaknesses were amplified and I was tasked to look into its improvement.

Skills: Stakeholder management | Communication | Synthesizing information

  1. Challenges:

    The process owners are not acquainted with process improvement frameworks (Lean Six Sigma) and are too busy with day jobs to be motivated to work on this independently. The core project team only consisted of 1 other temp and both of us were not subject matter experts.

  2. Learnings:

    Stakeholder and change management, scaffolded on numerous small gains helped to bring this to success.

  3. Improvements:

    Hiring expert external consultants may be able to move the project forward quicker with larger gains. Maintenance of software products takes dedicated resources and needs to be planned for and the approvals also need to be secured.

  4. Output:

    Understanding and aligning stakeholder needs and expectations, cross-functional process maps, documentation for process owners and user training videos/decks. Explored using TagUI to automate some repetitive work.

 
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Review & alignment of Terms & Conditions as well as internal processes

Our dated T&C was exposing us to legal risks. Revamping the T&C was the proposed solution.

Skills: Stakeholder management | Critical thinking | Project management | Attention to detail

  1. Challenges:
    There were more than 10 unique versions of T&C that have been updated piecemeal by the schools whenever an incident occurred that wasn’t covered legally. The team was only made up of 3 persons and some budget was set aside for legal review of the finalised document. There were stark cultural differences between international and local school leaders to align.

  2. Learnings:

    Stakeholder management, empathy and being able to explain legal implications to laypersons were key to success.

  3. Improvements:

    Consider attending part-time contract law courses to build capability.

  4. Output:

    Understanding and aligning stakeholder needs and expectations, spreadsheet tracking changes, finalised terms and conditions templates and liaison with the law firm.

 
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Electronic Student Contracts & Adobe Sign for CPE student contract renewal

Student contracts are renewable annually with total contract values in excess of S$20million. I wanted to digitalise the process so we can scale with little additional cost.

Skills: Stakeholder management | Capacity building | Knowledge management | Leadership

  1. Challenges:
    There was a lot of resistance to changing a well-oiled existing offline process that is also the lifeblood of the company’s revenue.


  2. Learnings:
    Stakeholder management and effective knowledge transfer were key to making this a reality.


  3. Improvements:

    Integration with existing systems for a more seamless internal and external experience.


  4. Output:

    Understanding and aligning stakeholder needs and expectations, customised workflows on Adobe Sign platform, user training and student contract templates.

 
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Ops interactive process deck

Management of schools used to be heavily decentralized. This led to many internal inefficiencies and made it difficult to adhere to the many different practices. The interactive process deck aims to unify and document a single source of truth to improve internal practices.

Skills: Stakeholder management | Systems thinking | Synthesizing information

  1. Challenges:

    There is little buy-in from leadership due to company culture underweighting scalability. There’s only 1 other temp working on this together with me as a result. 

  2. Learnings:

    We had to implement a low-tech solution that kept it accessible for maintenance and distribution so we settled on Powerpoint. It also makes it easier to make edits during the initial phase while we unify everyone’s processes.

  3. Improvements:
    Once the processes are firmed up, we can publish it more on a more permanent and official platform.

  4. Output:
    Interactive PDF deck detailing map of operations.

 
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Grab For Business & MVNO Telcos

Prior to this, everyone who wanted to submit transport claims had to keep all their taxi receipts and fill out a spreadsheet manually on a monthly basis. We also only had corporate telco plans with Singtel / M1 / Starhub.

Skills: Stakeholder management | Communication

  1. Challenges:
    I was so new to the company that I only sought executive support and omitted the process owner unknowingly.

  2. Learnings:

    After omitting the process owner during the Grab for Business implementation, I made sure to include and loop in the process owner for the corporate telco plans, starting with Circles.Life.

  3. Improvements:

    Mapping out the stakeholders before coming up with an improvement plan, especially when new to a company as different companies have different structures.

  4. Output:
    Securing executive sponsorship for Grab for Business accounts and MVNO CIS accounts available for colleagues.