Major Financial Services Company: Business Process Improvement

Summary

Doreen Evans Associates assisted in documenting business processes and in identifying improvement opportunities.

Client Company Profile

A leading global provider of financial protection and wealth management products, including life insurance, pensions, annuities and group benefits, in Canada, the United States and Asia.

Business Challenge

The company was at risk of losing business due to lengthy processing and poor customer tracking. They recognized the need to investigate the improvement of operations in certain areas and to pursue the implementation of a web-enabled, “customer” service model down the road.

Solution

DEA began working with the company on a business analysis and improvement initiative for the Annuity Transfer process. Instead of limiting the scope of the project to system requirements, DEA recommended that analysis be conducted on all of the business areas that were in any way involved with the processing. This would allow a complete understanding of the processing as a whole, including interdependencies across business areas and systems. It also enabled the team to better identify root causes of the problems and recommend changes to automated as well as manual processing. The goal of the project was to look for areas of issue/opportunity and to identify short, mid, and long term recommendations for improvement.

In order to achieve this goal, DEA relied on its proprietary methodology, LINKProcess™, to guide the project and used the software tool, System Architect, to capture, organize, analyze and report on the information gathered. Facilitator-led modeling sessions were conducted to initially jump start the effort and subsequent interviews were held to iron out the details.

Models were built to illustrate the current scope of the Transfer Process as well as the interfaces to the process and the information exchanged. A high level life cycle was identified, which served to provide the areas of focus of understanding and analyzing the work flow.

The Work Flow models served as the basis for understanding the “As-Is” processing and identifying areas and ways to improve the process. The analysis focused on ways to eliminate redundancy and duplication, areas where steps could be eliminated, areas where manual steps could be automated to streamline the process and reduce the likelihood of error, and areas where better education and information would reduce the need to correct errors or redo work. One of the most beneficial results of this particular phase of the feasibility study was that the organizational units involved in the life cycle became aware of the dependencies that exist between and among them. The resulting deliverables placed the company in a position to streamline their processes as well as to assess off-the-shelf packages that could provide faster and smoother operations.