Streamlining paper-to-digital information process

Streamlining paper-to-digital information process in a high-volume, multi-site environment

This organisation provides information management systems and services to the financial industry, including transaction processing, outsourcing, business process outsourcing and software and systems solutions. The company serves more than 15,000 clients worldwide, including banks, credit unions, financial planners/investment advisers, insurance companies and agents, self-funded employers, lenders and savings institutions.

Locally, this organisation has experienced significant growth in a short period of time, and has secured the national cheque processing business for several larger banks in Australia.

Due to rapid business growth, recent business consolidation activities and the need to maintain a competitive advantage in the market place, conduct a detailed activity-level business review of all key operational facilities along the East coast to identify opportunities that will ensure the organisation:

• Effectively delivers against client needs
• Achieves 'best-in-class' staffing levels
• Maintains pace with 'best practice' efficiency performance benchmarks
• Provides appropriate transparency for critical business processes, resources, tasks and timing in order to achieve desired customer outputs

1. Identify 'business critical' processes; create high-level end-to-end process map of key processes showing linkages/inter-dependencies between processes.
2. Select 'pilot site'. Use Smartmapping© to conduct activity-level 'current-state' process review (at 'shop-floor' level). Conduct data gathering and KPI analysis to understand 'current state' performance.
3. Using 'pilot site' process map, perform process validation at other sites. Re-verify 'pilot site' based on validation work from other sites.
4. Benchmark current state condition against global competitors and other organisations in 'like' industries.
5. Review 'current-state' map to reveal 'hot spots', bottlenecks/constraints and identify improvement opportunities with key focus on the following:

• Eliminate 'non-value' activities
• Reduce complexity
• Reduce FTE resources whilst maintaining desired risk profile
• Increase throughput per FTE
• Standardise inputs, reduce in-process exceptions / variances
• Improve quality/accuracy of outputs
• Achieve SLA requirements
• Assess opportunity for additional automation/infrastructure investment

6. Prepare high level report summarising 'current-state' (as-is) issues and opportunities for improvement. Estimate business impact/benefit of key improvement initiatives.

• Detailed 'current-state' process maps (more than 190 individual maps) covering all processes and associated activities, including current resource levels.
• Identification of optimisation opportunities and associated potential resource reduction at two levels:

• System level - opportunities involve significant changes to the overall processing system, delivering substantial improvements in resource utilisation
• Process level - opportunities involve incremental improvements that collectively will deliver gains in resource utilisation.

• Identification (and some rectification) of state-by-state process variations
• Utilise industry benchmark figures to assess 'current-state' position against 'best in class' global competitors.
• Identification of further 'cross-boundary' variances and opportunities stemming from quality of inputs from customers.

Identification of improvement opportunities that will enable overall FTE resource reduction of 25-30%, whilst speeding up processing time and maintaining existing performance standards and risk profile.