Client Situation
Our client is a leading bank providing Retail, Corporate, and Islamic Banking services across UAE. Though the bank had a steady growth in its customer base, it faced unique challenges with a high operational turnaround time that adversely impacted its overall customer experience. The bank mandated Cedar to shortlist the top 15 high volume processes with manual iterations and reimagine them to reduce Turn Around Time (TAT).
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied a 5-step approach to shortlist and reimagine the processes for better efficiency and productivity:
- Process Shortlisting Framework - Cedar used its proprietary framework for process shortlisting and pre-defined the criteria agreed upon with the client. The high-level shortlisting criteria included transaction volumes, manual iterations, and business criticality. Cedar's consulting team shortlisted 15 operations based on these criteria for reimagination.
- Pain Point Assessment - Cedar conducted a preliminary analysis of the existing process SOPs to gather insights into the current processes. The team also held focus group conversations with process owners to identify pain points and system dependencies of shortlisted processes.
- Data Analysis - Cedar analyzed the process data to understand non-STP reasons and system limitations. In addition, the team also split each process into activity levels to understand the manual interventions required in processes.
- Industry Assessment - Cedar studied similar sub-process use cases using its proprietary tool 'PROFIT' to understand the industry's best practices.
- Process Redesign - Based on the pain point assessment, data analysis and industry assessment, Cedar redesigned processes for the bank. The reimagination focused on streamlining the processes with STP first approach and reducing the average handling time of the process.
Outcome
The program resulted in a best-in-class process reimagination for the bank with the following results:
- Reduced average handling time for all processes; 33% of the shortlisted processes were converted from manual or semi-automatic to Straight Through Processing (STP).
- Identified potential savings opportunity of ~ USD 2 Mill annually for the bank.
- Reduced operational cost through elimination of excess capacity of 36 FTEs post-reimagination.
- Delivered implementable and pragmatic process designs, keeping the banks current and target architecture in mind.