Process improvement and the BA

01The problem

Harbourline Freight clears its customers' imported containers through Lagos port. Every day a container stays at the port after its three free days, the terminal charges demurrage: ₦45,000 per container per day. In the first four months of 2026, Harbourline's customers paid ₦184m in demurrage, and the account managers spent much of their time apologising for it.

The operations director's instinct is to "push the clearing team harder". But the clearing team isn't idle. Most of the time a container sits at the port, nobody is working on it at all: it's waiting for documents, for payment, for an inspection slot. You can't fix waiting by making people work faster.

That's the central insight of Lean, and this course teaches you to find where time and money really go in a process, and to change the process rather than push the people.

02The concept

Lean and Six Sigma in one paragraph each

Lean (from Toyota's production system) is about flow: delivering value to the customer with as little waste, waiting and effort as possible. Its tools include value stream maps, the eight wastes and pull systems.

Six Sigma (from Motorola and GE) is about variation and defects: making a process reliable, so results are predictable. Its improvement cycle is DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control.

Most organisations blend the two ("Lean Six Sigma"). You don't need a belt to use them; a BA who can map a process, measure it from data and find root causes is already doing the core work.

The improvement cycle

Measures customers feel

Frame the problem around what the customer experiences, not internal activity:

• Lead time: from the container's arrival to its release from the port (and on to the customer's door).
• Cost: demurrage the customer pays.
• Quality: how often a clearance goes wrong first time (documents rejected, corrections needed).

"Clearing staff processed 20 files a day" is an activity measure. "Containers spend 8.6 days at port" is something the customer feels.

03Example

The improvement problem statement:

Harbourline's import containers spend an average of 8.6 days at Lagos port from arrival to release, against 3 free days, so customers paid ₦184m in demurrage in January to April 2026. About a third of clearances need corrected documents from the customer before they can proceed. We'll measure success by average days at port, demurrage per container and the share of clearances with complete documents on arrival.

It names the customer impact, the size and the measures, and like every good problem statement it doesn't name a solution.

04Walkthrough

1. Download the process dataset. Open cases.csv (one row per clearance) and events.csv (every activity, with start and end times).
2. For each case, calculate days at port: released_datetime − arrival_datetime.
3. Calculate the average days at port for the cases before the checklist pilot (checklist_pilot = No), then the days to the customer's door and the total demurrage for those cases (the tasks below).
4. Look at docs_complete_on_arrival. What share of clearances arrive with incomplete documents?
5. Write the problem statement in your own words.

05Practice

06Check your understanding