Quality Control

At Millington Savings Bank, quality control is a very important attribute to consider because it tests the customer satisfaction. Millington Savings continuously focuses on improving its quality and keeping its customers highly satisfied with the service it provides. All quality control must begin initially with the process itself; it can be an individual machine, a group of machines, or any of the administrative processes that exist within the organization. Millington Savings has its own internal customers, products, and services offered that are produced.

The first step in designing a quality control system for Millington Savings Bank would be to identify the processes where inspection and testing are needed. Inspection should be done per each teller, making sure every teller knows what they are doing and doing so properly. It is very important that each teller is trained and educated properly with the banking procedures and systems used at the institution. There should be no error reports occurring and if so it should be on a rare occasion. Testing of the transaction time is important as well. Depending on the transaction at hand, the customers should not have to wait more than five minutes for the transaction to be completed. Also wait time should be limited, customers should not have to wait to be helped; if there is proper staffing within the bank customers should be helped immediately. Technology as well plays a role; it should be up to par with the banking systems, which will provide a smooth transaction process for both the teller and customer. The second step is to decide on the type of measurement to be used at inspection point. The quality control method that Millington Savings currently uses is the attribute measurement of control. The attribute method measures the counts, such as the number of defects in a sample. In the attribute the product characteristic is evaluated with a discrete choice, whether is it good or bad, yes or no.  The third step is to decide on the amount of inspection to use. Millington Savings inspects or in other words audits all the teller cashboxes once a month, the main vault once a day, the ATM once a day, the coin counting machine once a day, and proves out the whole branch at the end of each day. The final step in designing a quality control system is deciding who should do the inspection. In Millington Savings Bank’s case there is internal and external auditing that occurs. The internal is when the manager and/or head teller audits each tellers cashbox once a month, audits the vault, coin machine, and ATM once a day. The external is the hired auditing company that shows up unexpectedly at each branch location once a year and audits out the entire branch to make sure everything is running smoothly and properly within the banking regulations.

Continuous improvement is used; it is administered through the fishbone diagram. Millington Savings believes in searching for the true causes of each and every problem, to develop the best solution possible. The fishbone diagram provides a cause and effect method, experimenting with brainstorming in a structured format. The brainstorming technique helps to identify the root cause of the problem in a structured and uncomplicated manner and to work and essentially fix each prior cause.

Millington Savings Bank uses the process improvement steps of Six Sigma (DMAIC), which is, define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. Six Sigma uses the project/team approach. A process is selected for improvement then a cross-functional team is formed, someone is chosen as the black belt to be the head of the team, in Millington Savings case the black belt would be the branch manager; and the team will use the DMAIC method to find the main causes and improve the process. The Six Sigma approach is very project focused and intensifies training to the staff, which will all in all eliminate defects. Each and every step is important for improving the flow of the institution.

Some new ideas for quality control that Millington Saving Bank may consider would be to continue to expand new technology efficiencies. Although Millington Savings does offer online banking as well as telephone banking, another modern feature would be mobile banking. This would be a faster and more convenient way for customers to bank, to have an application on a mobile device. Also, Millington Savings should offer temporary ATM or debit bankcards. Larger commercial banks offer a temporary card so when a customer opens an account they receive a temporary bankcard right away until the official one comes in the mail. Millington Savings does not offer this feature; customers would have to wait seven to ten days to receive the bankcard in the mail. With these two additional features, customer satisfaction would definitely increase positively for Millington Savings Bank.