by Ken Snyder

Last year, I had the opportunity to attend a Shingo workshop in Ogden, Utah, with a group of management team members from the Utah-based operations center of Discover Financial. These leaders shared with me some of the progress they were making using the principles of the Shingo Model in their organization. They didn’t suspect at the time of the workshop that they would be tested so soon.

Discover’s leaders had experimented with call center workers working off-site for a few years, but they never envisioned they would need to move the entire operation off-site. On March 13th, in an effort to keep their people safe and to practice social distancing, they decided to move all call center operations off-site. By March 20th, just one week later, the technology staff and the call center team members had set up 8,000 call center team members to work in their homes.

The move was complicated by a 5.7 earthquake that struck near the largest operations center in Utah the same week. Discover was forced to shut down its largest facility for a day.

How did Discover move so quickly?

They report, “Having the right technology in place—and incredibly committed teams—made the difference. We have never seen anything like the work orchestrated to mobilize so many thousands of people. We’ve simply never done anything at this scale.”

You can read more about this amazing accomplishment at:

https://medium.com/tech-discover/how-discover-mobilized-an-army-of-8-000-u-s-e69fa93e399b