Financial Services
The Client
A leading American financial institution with more than 1,100 centers nationwide was in the middle of a rapid expansion and was opening over 100 new centers per year. To open a new center, multiple people from nearly every department in the company had to closely coordinate their activities to hit the targeted open date.
The Problem
Company employees were coordinating their activities through shared Excel spreadsheets, email, and face to face conversations. While this approach worked reasonably well in the earlier days, increased volume and the additional people involved in opening a center from site selection to turning the keys over to operations had increased. In short, a small business had turned into a large business and the firm had simply outgrown its processes.
Some of the problems faced by the company included:
- Data integrity. Information was kept on multiple spreadsheets. Making sure that each spreadsheet agreed with the others was error prone and took a great deal of time. Also, spreadsheets offer little in the way of data validation. Instead of restricting what can be entered into a field based on the business rules, spreadsheets allow users to type anything.
- Security and data ownership. Any spreadsheet field could be updated by any employee, and there was no audit trail or access restriction available in Excel.
- Reporting. Since data was spread across multiple spreadsheets, reports had to be manually constructed and was a time intensive process.
- Who has the latest version, anyway? Since spreadsheets invariably got mailed around, saved, and worked on locally, employees were never completely sure if they were working from the latest version of the spreadsheets.
The Iron Horse Solution
To solve these problems, Iron Horse crafted a workflow solution. All information on the center opening process was moved from spreadsheets into a database. Each employee now logs into the workflow solution and sees a dashboard that only displays the fields that are relevant to their job. New center’s records appear on each employee’s dashboard at the appropriate time in the workflow. Once an employee completes her task, the new center’s records are removed from her dashboard. Data that is input into the solution is validated against business rules, and reports can be run on-demand in seconds with the click of a button.
Similar Problems? We Can Help!
If your company has outgrown your old workflows and you’re spending too much time tracking information instead of focusing on your core competencies, we can help you too.
