Case Study Three
The Supply Chain Finance (SCF) programme for a top 5 UK Bank was struggling to deal with the success that the sales had achieved and many Clients were taking up to 2 months to be onboarded to the SCF Product. An end-to-end review of the process – which involved 9 teams across 5 countries – was undertaken to discover how the process could be improved.
The initial success of the project was in getting a representative from each of the teams in the same room – something that had not been done before. With all of them there the project manager constructed a Value Stream Map (VSM) of the end-to-end process and at the same time developed a heat map of issues and wastes (non-value add activity). From there, requirements were created and an action plan to be executed was generated. One fundamental finding of the project was that up to that point no process metrics existed or were measured despite there being service level agreements (SLA’s) in place.
The project team had weekly meetings to report progress and raise other issues and risks. Initial requirements were to develop a shared progress tracking mechanism prior to a full technical solution being generated, to define and measure some key process indicators (KPI’s) and to instigate an operational huddle to discuss day-to-day programme issues. During the execution of the action plan other teams were brought in to provide solutions where they were required and both local as well as enterprise solutions were implemented. Visual management was used to manage paperwork more efficiently in the offices, documentation was inventoried, analysed and simplified (including re-wording) and a significant amount of non-value add activity was removed.
The project was successfully closed after 16 weeks with the end-to-end onboarding time reduced from around 2 months to under 7 days. This also increased client satisfaction because they no longer had to chase the Bank for progress updates. Financial benefits from the work were >£200k pa as the team could onboard more clients to programmes