Check out: Six Sigma Case Study

The Documentum Operations Support and Maintenance Project (PEARSON-ROW) uses Six
sigma to reduce effort and cost variances.

The process approach of addressing the above mentioned challenge via DMAIC frame
work.

The Six Sigma Project was sponsored by Mr. Yongjin Huang (Product Manager
PEARSO
N) & Co-Sponsored by Mr. Anupam Ghosh (O.D. ETS-ECMP-WXM) and Asha Vaish (DGM ETSECMP-WXM). The project was led by Rajat Kapoor (Project Manager - ETS-ECMP-WXM) a
nd supported by Amit Jandial (GPM ETS-ECMP-WXM). The project was mentored by Sidd
harth Vasudev of Six Sigma Team headed by Sridevi Sundarajan.

Pearson ROW Documentum Operations Support team (Documentum platform) has been in
troduced to support business users on their day to day issues on business activi
ties of Product Store & Asset Library applications. This support also helps user
s to enhance the exiting system and to solve their issue by involving L2 & L3 su
pport team.

Business Case:
There was a need to reduce the manual effort spent on a daily basis as this was
negatively impacting the productivity and efficiency of the DCTM operations supp
ort team. The following main issues/gap areas were identified for remediation:
It was taking 2hrs per day for deployment of build artifacts which was very
high.
Existing user onboarding was error prone and was taking around 3hrs per day.
Elastic search redundant issues were reported on a daily basis which was tak
ing around 2.5hrs for investigation.
Standard Migration of Documentum servers to POD environment was a time consu
ming and a complex process. It was consuming 6hrs in a day.
Request for assets migration from ShutterstStock application were time consu
ming and generally taking 3hrs per day.
Manual monitoring of Server logs was taking around 2hrs a day for all instan
ces.
Adhoc reports on a daily basis were consuming 1.4hrs.
Business users are also looking for quicker response on their requests.

Define The Six Sigma Project goal aimed towards reducing the manual effort spent
as this was negatively impacting the productivity and efficiency. Business user
s were also looking for quicker response on their requests. The overall goal was
aimed to reduce the manual effort and overhead cost of DCTM OPS SUPPORT process
es (L2 & L3 Support) by 40% in a period of 4 months.

Measure

Qualitative analysis study on the key processes impacting the problems w

ith respect to Product Store and Asset Library applications. Further a GAP analy
sis was performed to hunt for opportunities of improvement in process life cycle
.
Team also worked towards collecting defects incident information to introspect t
he causes in Analyze phase.

Analyze
In Analyze phase, the Project team analyzed various causes that were imp
acting the overall effort and productivity of DCTM OPS team (L2 & L3). The Team
worked on an Exhaustive causal analysis using Cause and Effect analysis to ident
ify the main causes and related sub causal factors that influences the process.
The identified categories are 1) Manual User Onboarding process, 2) Manual Monit
oring of Server Logs, 3) Manual process to deploy applications build artifacts,
4) Time consuming migration process to POD, 5) Manual process to generate ADHOC
reports , 6) ElasticSearch Issues 7) Manual migration of Assets from Shutterstoc
k application. Out of these 7 categories first 4 Gap areas Categories are more
severe and attention towards these four was very much required.

Improve The Project identified potential solution sets to against identified cau
ses to control them, solutions identified which are as follows:
Automated user onboarding process introduced with an objective to automa
te user profile creation, LDAP SYNC configuration improvements for 2 application
s. This actually reduced the total time to resolve the incidents of user onboard
ing category.

Automated Build artefacts deployment process introduced to achieve reduc

tion in overall time to deploy build artefacts on 60+ instances of tomcat, Jboss
application servers across 2 data centres in 2 different regions.

Automated the Server logs monitoring for daily monitoring activities of

DCTM servers and environments, to monitor the server logs in an automated fashio
n for around 60+ instances of Tomcat & Jboss app servers, Content servers, index
servers and other services across 2 data centres.

Developed a custom approach for migration of Documentum servers/environm

ents from one data centre to another to overcome the shortcomings /complexities
of Standard Migration process.

Automated the reports creation process f or all Ad-hoc reports requests

received on a daily basis such as User Base, space availability etc. to reduce t
he manual effort on a daily basis.

Established best practices as key inputs for design, setup and architect
ural improvements for Elastic Search integration with Documentum.

Integrated Shutterstock application and automated the migration process

of assets along with metadata from Shutterstock website to Documentum repository

Control
Effectiveness on implementation were tracked over a period of 16 weeks a
nd compared against effort spent pre-implementation of improvements. Post to the
implementation of identified solutions/improvements Avg. Monthly effort on tick
et resolution reduced overall to 72%.

This Process improvement initiative resulted in Customer savings of 163,152 USD

per annum, which was shared and signed off by the customer (PEARSON) and acknowl
edged as increase in overall resource productivity.