Process Excellence

Hidden Efficiencies – An option at almost every financial service provider

In our experience, hidden efficiencies remain dormant at banks, insurances and financial service providers. The key questions that companies should ask themselves are:

• What are the key levers for efficiency in our processes?
• How can we reduce throughput times?
• Which footholds for reducing mistakes or increasing quality can we find in our processes?
• How do the processes actually function at our company?

There are diverse root causes of inefficient processes:

• Fast (organic) growth without scaling up processes at the same time.
• Insufficiently assimilated structural changes or mergers in the past.
• Insufficient translation of the company’s strategic aims into operational targets for its executives and employees.
• No defined structures, unclear or lacking procedural descriptions, an ambiguous allocation of responsibilities, too many manual tasks and insufficient support for staff in their workflows.

Typical consequences include the inconsistent use of media, efforts wasted on unnecessary tasks, redundant work, and blocked interfaces, to name but a few examples. Seen as a whole, however, these minor difficulties have a major impact on the competitiveness of many banks.

The Key Factors for the Success of our Consultancy Approach

Our consultancy approach is centred around the following key success factors:

A focus on the main levers:

Our experience suggests that a concrete set of hypotheses concerning the main levers can be prepared on the basis of our know-how of the industry and our past experience at other companies even before the start of the project. This catalogue can be expanded to include the particularities of your organization and thus provides a crucial focus for the project, without any preconceptions leading us to blank out potentially important levers.

Comprehensive project experience and knowledge of the industry:

Over the past years, Kienbaum Management Consultants has used its top-tier, experienced strategy consultants and its traditionally strong HR competence to establish an expertise in the financial services industry that is unique in our markets. We can therefore offer our insights in your industry, benchmarks and a profound knowledge of the markets for all of our consultancy projects.

Full consideration for the specific organization of our clients:

The optimization of processes needs to be seen in the context of our client’s organization. Any optimization work affects the shape of a company’s IT structures just as much as its incentive systems or organizational make-up. This also means that any partial optimization of individual processes should be avoided in favour of an integrated approach. Our consultancy approach includes all dimensions relevant for your company in our pursuit of efficient processes.

Cooperative involvement of your staff:

Measures for improving efficiency often lead to apprehension among staff, fears of the new tasks that they have to cover, concerns about changes in responsibilities etc. For the success of any procedural optimization effort, it is therefore essential to involve our client’s staff actively in the development of optimized processes. Motivating the affected employees is particularly vital when it comes to the implementation and successful realization of the optimization potential.

A focus on implementation:

Potential efficiencies are only achieved when the optimization measures have been implemented in the workplace. From the very beginning of our design work, the focus of our consultancy approach therefore lies on the viability of the measures we proprose.

Our 5-Phase Consultancy Model

Our procedural optimization work is based on the following five phases:

Process Design and Documentation:

The first step in any optimization of processes is to record the existing procedural landscape, i.e. to survey the duties, responsibilities and the conventional or electronic instruments used in the relevant workflows. The decisive factor is finding the appropriate level of detail for all of this. Our experience suggests that disproportionate attention paid to details is not helpful for the actual optimization of processes, whereas it can be necessary for documentary purposes. When modelling processes, we follow two paths: the necessary structured survey of processes and systems in their actual reality, and the pursuit of the main driving factors and constraints in the business area in question.

Definition of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

The optimization of processes needs to help in the pursuit of the company’s targets. This means that the central KPIs need to be defined on the basis of the corporate goals. These are used as the guideline for designing the processes and organization, and therefore provide the foundation for developing the optimization measures.

Process Analysis and Proposal of Optimization Measures:

A number of factors play a part in the proposal of the eventual approach to optimizing the processes: the first line of enquiry has to be the client’s staff and their know-how. Oftentimes, employees already have a wealth of ideas about how to optimize workflows. We build on this with a systematic analysis of the surveyed processes. This will reveal any unclear responsibilities or redundant duties, and provides a basis for effective countermeasures. Further support in this context can be derived in the form of benchmarks from Kienbaum’s project experience and knowledge of the industry.

Development of an Optimization Concept:

Apart from the identification of optimization measures, the plans need to be evaluated in full. This makes sure that the first interventions will have the best possible impact on the efficiency of processes. Based on our evaluation of individual measures, an optimization concept is designed that includes a set of fully prioritized interventions for increasing procedural efficiency.

Implementation Concept and Operational Planning:

Realizing this optimization concept calls for a definition of the necessary resources. The resources required by all of the proposed optimization measures are forecast in cooperation with our clients. Taking into account all potential interdependencies between these resources, we prepare an implementation concept / project plan for turning the potential efficiencies into workplace reality.

Please feel free to contact us. We are always ready for a first, general exchange of ideas with you.