Applying Deming's Process Improvement Techniques to Banking

A small‐business loan department of a branch of a large bank wondered why clients were not enrolling as expected in an automatic loan payment program that offered many advantages. Rather than seeing this as a marketing problem, they dug deep into the program's process and discovered a variety of real problems which, once identified, were relatively easy to fix. The critical step was to correctly identify the problem—and they found that applying classic Total Quality Management ( TQM ) analysis tools worked remarkably well. Even in this non‐manufacturing situation, the work process was what needed scrutiny in order to improve.