CONTEXT

Our client, the operations area of a large Australian wealth management business, was experiencing increasing unit costs, poor service outcomes to customers and increasing rework rates.  The CEO engaged CACE Partners to undertake a review of the operations areas to reduce absolute costs in the two operations centres by 20% whilst improving customer service and rework rates.

INSIGHTS / APPROACH

CACE Partners undertook a diagnostic to understand four key elements:

• Transaction volume trends
• Cost structure – operating costs, FTE’s and unit costs (cost per transaction)
• Service metrics and trends – percentage of work items processing within both internal and external service level agreements
• Quality metrics and trends – percentage of errors captured by rework and external reporting.

The diagnostic quickly identified the need for the development and implementation of a management toolkit.  The management and staff in the operations areas lacked transparency in key cost, service and quality measures.  Thus, they were unable to manage their areas based on data/facts.

CACE Partners worked with the client to introduce a management toolkit with the following key characteristics:

• All activities within the operations areas were broken down into three groups (core workflow, core non-workflow, overhead)
• Productivity targets by activity (expected effort time) were developed for each activity within each group via a combination of data analysis and activity observation
• Data capture tools and forecasting, planning and reporting was established at an individual, team, area and department level
• A mixture of formal training and on the floor coaching was provided to team members and managers to deploy the approach over a 3-month period, supported by an extensive communication strategy
• Managers were measured on their maturity on a weekly basis as they obtained mechanical, conceptual and then ownership compliance of the tools and processes to achieve behavioural change in their teams.