A Mid-Sized Credit Union Discovers The Power of Process

Often organizations overlook the power of having good visibility on their existing processes. By leveraging process modeling in the cloud, this credit union made changes to it's goals, flows and work assignments with impressive results for their underwriting processes.

The Problem: 

Quite often organizations think they understand their existing flows because everybody knows their own job well and feels that others should as well. In reality, when a combined process flow is created across job roles, organizational boundaries and even outside the base organization, the process map tends to point out problems that only appear when you put the big picture together. There ends up being significant benefit to creating a current flow usually revolving around removing unnecessary or old task steps. Quite often, role and goal conflicts can be discussed and resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. These benefits usually come from removing unnecessary work and the benefits can be quite large in large scoped end to end processes such as supply chains and value chains. This organization had no documented processes. 

The Solution:

Using Business Process Analysis(BPA) technology, in the cloud, this organization adjusted its processes to improve member satisfaction levels. For example, credit union used its member feedback process to pinpoint that the delay between submitting an online loan application and receiving a response frustrated members. The organization quickly established an improved loan application process. In the past, an underwriter reviewed every loan application, which took two business days or longer. Now, if the loan application meets standard underwriting requirements, members receive an immediate answer, and only those loans that fall outside the requirements need underwriter review. The organization also reengineered its mortgage process.

The Results:

 Using a process modeling offering, this credit union identified points of redundancy and bottlenecks within the process, resulting in an 80 percent reduction in cycle times and improved member satisfaction ratings. In addition, they set up new processes to ensure it communicates with members throughout the mortgage process. They achieved the following benefits through its use of a cloud based process modeling capability: 

●● ● A 52 percent reduction in average time to fund home equity loans
●● ● A 71 percent increase in loans handled per underwriter 
●● ● A 61 percent reduction in average time from application to funding 
of car loans 

●● ● A 36 percent increase in loans funded with no increase in staff 

Net; Net: 

Understanding the reality of your processes and casting a wide net for collaborating on process improvements can deliver significant operational improvements.

This is a highly summarized case study provided by IBM and Blue Works Live