Describe a quick-hit opportunity you identified and implemented.

Remember to include a description of the benefits that were realized as a result of the improvement you were responsible for. The improvement should clearly demonstrate value to external customers, internal operations groups, or both.

"I worked with an operations team that managed client billing for a large studio company. The company normally booked studio resources in daily increments, but they allowed clients to split studio time when the crews could be shared across both groups over the course of a day.

These split bookings often resulted in a significant amount of billing errors that my clients had to sort out and correct each month before clients were officially billed. Additionally, the project managers responsible for the booking process frequently complained about all of the extra data entry involved in splitting the resources correctly in the scheduling and billing systems.

I worked at this company as a product manager responsible for various features on the company's website. I often participated in customer outreach programs and billing errors came up frequently. Billing was not my area, but I reached out to the operations team to find out what the process for billing splits was anyway. I was hopeful that there was something relatively easy I could do to help improve customer satisfaction.

After reviewing their workflow, I asked if it would be possible to streamline all of the shared bookings through two project managers who would be trained to specialize in the process. My customers agreed. Additionally, I worked with a development team to generate a query that identified shared bookings within the system. We assigned two junior accounting analysts to the task of reviewing the report regularly and addressing any billing or scheduling errors. They also worked directly with the project managers to answer any data entry questions as various scenarios came up.

We were able to implement this change in process in less than two weeks. Billing errors dropped off significantly and were almost eliminated entirely within two months. The query cost less than one thousand dollars to develop, and the staff augmentation was free. We sped up the monthly billing reconciliation process by 30 staff hours a month, and our external customers greatly appreciated the elimination of the errors and the time savings on their end."