Success in reducing administration processes

Escalating volumes and increasing regulations

The Bank has a statutory obligation under Data Protection legislation to provide their customers (or authorised representatives) with a copy of all personal information held on them within 40 days if requested. This is called a Subject Access Request or SAR. Due to the huge number of PPI compensation claims, the bank was inundated with new SAR requests and needed help making this more efficient and effective.

The team that completes these requests had already increased to 38.5 FTE and was going to need to at least double again to meet the current volumes.

Completing a diagnostic review of the end-to-end process

We spent time gathering information from the Voice of the Business, Process, Customer & Employee. We reviewed Operational MI used by the team. We then observed the tasks in the process and created a high level current state map. We also identified keys areas of waste and non-value add activities.

The insight gained from the diagnostic highlighted a number of potential issues:

• A change in the type of customer, the requirement and the profile and type of demand not being reflected in the original process.
• Lack of flow throughout the process – with much batching and queuing and high levels of work in progress.
• Significant management time spent maintaining records and spreadsheets simply to control the work in the system
• Significant resource time spent on non-value adding activities

Changing the entire operating model

A walk-through diagnostic was used to prepare a high level current state value stream map and enable an initial assessment of the current state. ‘Process Stapling’ was used in the creation of the high level map to ensure focus on what actually happened to a specific request as it made its way through the process.

Value Stream Mapping was the main vehicle in a series of workshops as the appropriate way to engage and involve managers and staff in capturing the true current state and in developing a future state solution. We deployed various Quality Tools during the project to collect and analyse data and to monitor the process such as Check sheets, Bar charts, Pareto analysis, Fishbone diagrams and Run Charts.

The 8 wastes and 5 Whys were introduced and used extensively as part of the current state analysis.

Thinking differently about the work

We completely transformed the work in this department – including the outputs required by 3rd parties. They weren’t interested in a full Subject Access Request, where the bank provides all interactions and information stored. They just wanted to know if they ever had PPI. So we changed they way they sent us requests and changed the way we responded to them – ensuring we remained compliant the whole way.

Achieving staggering results

It used to take 38.5 FTE to deliver 196 cases per week. After our work with the department, the new approach required 24.3 FTE to deliver 441 cases per week. Put another way – an FTE used to deliver 5.1 cases per week – they now deliver 18.1 cases per week. That’s 3.5 times the amount of work.

Average Case timings fell from 6.7 hours per case to 1.8 hours per case – That’s a 73% increase in productivity.

We also delivered a 20.4% increase in quality and removed 10 days from the average time to complete a case.  Ultimately the business saved £458k in actual costs and avoided another £1.28m in additional staffing that would have been required. Total savings to the business were £1.75m per year.