Identifying capacity release in line with cost targets

Our client is a large American investment banking and financial services company providing investment management, asset management and custodial services to clients across multiple countries. 

Banking – Investment Services and Investment Management

Capacity diagnostics across business operations to identify opportunity to release or re align to meet overall cost targets.

Identified 29% over capacity in 3 back office process spread across geographies performed by 40FTEs. This diagnostic was completed within days instead of weeks.

Bank’s business operations were looking to identify opportunities to reduce operating cost. There were three layers that needed to be considered: People/Process/Technology. The first most important aspect to be considered was people-cost and therefore a need to evaluate ideal capacity requirement across all teams, locations and lines of business.

When performed at scale, studies like these usually takes a lot of effort and time for data gathering, analysis and reporting back to stakeholders. They had dependencies on data availability as well as requirement of time from subject matter experts. This added significantly to the cost and duration of such programs.

In addition, the expertise to conduct these reviews is limited to a few members of project teams and transformation experts. To augment these skills with external consultants can make the costs prohibitive.

It also leads to the risk of external consultants adding to the disruption being experienced by the business. Recommendations developed by external consultants can face additional barriers to acceptance, and make the retained organisation feel disempowered and disengaged.

Using Open Orbit, the team had to identify gaps between current installed capacity against estimated FTE requirement and eventually determine over/under capacity

After a 2-day on-site exercise utilising Open Orbit diagnostic methodology, some SME time and pulling in basic management information on volumes and handle time, the team was able to identify opportunities worth 29.5% capacity release.

An “Optimum-path” model of the process was drafted. Because of this unique structure and framework, the right questions were directed to the SMEs that eased the data gathering process without losing focus on process complexities and overall customer impact.

FTE calculations were performed automatically by the technology that revealed 29% over capacity.

Analysis on Open Orbit narrated the story in its entirety. It helped to capture all steps and how the transaction flows in different scenarios unlike the traditional process maps that remains a tool for the expert only. The Optimum path analysis in this case consolidated all work types instead of multiple flow charts thus easing the overall approach of analysis capacity requirement.

This approach ensured that the pursuit of productivity is not at the cost of customer outcomes but in fact aides better customer outcomes.