Section B – TWO questions ONLY to be attempted
3 Thebe Telecom is a large national telephone business in Fayland. Thebe provides telephone service to more than
11 million customers through its fixed line and mobile services. Thebe has three strategic business units: mobile; fixed
line telephone (incorporating broadband); and corporate services (serving other businesses’ telephone needs). It has
become the largest mobile operator in Fayland through a series of acquisitions of competitors and operating licences.
Thebe’s CEO has won many awards for being an innovative businessman who recognises the rapid changes in
technology, regulation and competitor action that occur in the sector. Thebe’s major competitor in Fayland is the
original nationalised telephone company, FayTel, which was privatised 20 years ago but which retains many of the
features of a monopoly supplier including a massive infrastructure. As a result, Thebe’s CEO realised long ago that
competition on the basis of price and volume would not work against such a large competitor and so he has focused
on customer service as the key to growing the business.
In order to improve the company’s competitive position, the CEO decided that the company should consider a Six
Sigma initiative to give an immediate step change improvement to the service quality at Thebe. The initiative involved
a number of projects including one to improve the quality of customers’ bills. FayTel was publicly criticised by the
government’s consumer advocate who pointed to occasional misallocations of call minutes to the wrong numbers and
also, more frequently, the application of incorrect tariffs in calculating the costs of calls. Thebe’s CEO is aware that all
telephone businesses (including Thebe) have these problems but this is an area in which Thebe can gain a
competitive advantage and has taken a special interest in this project by championing it himself.
The project is focused on improving the accuracy of customers’ bills and the handling of complaints. Within the billing
department, the company divided activities into normal money collection, credit control on overdue payments and
managing complaints. Process diagrams were created for each of these areas and then data was sourced from
customer feedback at the various points of interaction with Thebe employees (such as complaint handling) and
internal measurables created. The project team was formed from line managers from all three strategic business units
and the billing department.
Required:
(a) Explain how the general way in which Six Sigma is implemented helps improve the quality of performance
illustrating your answer with reference to Thebe. (8 marks)
(b) Explain and illustrate how the DMAIC method for the implementation of Six Sigma could be applied at Thebe.
(9 marks)
(17 marks)
84 Ganymede University (GU) is one of the three largest universities in Teeland, which has eight universities in total. All
of the universities are in the public sector. GU obtains the vast majority of its revenue through government contracts
for academic research and payments per head for teaching students. The economy of Teeland has been in recession
in the last year and this has caused the government to cut funding for all the universities in the country.
In order to try to improve efficiency, the chancellor of the university, who leads its executive board, has asked the head
administrator to undertake an exercise to benchmark GU’s administration departments against the other two large
universities in the country, AU and BU. The government education ministry has supported this initiative and has
required all three universities to cooperate by supplying information.
The following information has been collected regarding administrative costs for the most recent academic year:
