Process Excellence in the Financial Industry

Our client is one of the most prestigious banks in the world. Following an audit recommendation, the Bank had recently started work to map and improve processes in its finance function. Initially, as part of this work, a small number of staff had been trained in process improvement and Lean 6-Sigma techniques, but they had not applied these skills to a live project. These staff were given the role of Process Champions.

The Bank was aware that there were several inefficiencies in its finance processes. There was a culture of duplication of effort and rework. Many of the processes are initiated in other departments, such as procurement and HR.

The Challenge

There were inconsistencies in how these departments worked meaning that the finance team were left to obtain missing information before processing items; for example, the amount of detail on purchase orders generated internally was often insufficient to pay invoices received from external parties. Additionally, checks on work were duplicated and there was no proper workflow in place. The duplicated checks were sometimes made against different source documents as departments did not have access to the same records. An example of this was how the Bank identified items of expenditure that would subsequently be capitalised. The project teams had access to more detailed information and made the initial decision. A finance Business Partner then confirmed the decision by reference to the original business case. The finance team then made additional checks to verify that the cost item was categorised correctly.

Our approach

A series of three workshops were held with the Process Champions and subject matter experts to:

• Workshop One: map key finance processes at a high level; for example, P2P and month end. Identify high level pain points and areas for improvement.
• Workshop Two: map, in more detail, specific finance processes in scope; for example, P2P: request purchase order. Identify pain points, wastes and duplications in the process and specific actions that could be taken to ensure improvement.
• Workshop Three: for each finance process in scope, the specific actions for improvement were prioritised and owners agreed. Actions were prioritised in view of the amount of benefit that would be generated against the cost of implementation.

The Outcome

The Bank now has a prioritised action plan identifying process improvements ranked by benefit and cost of implementation.

• Weekly meetings are taking place to review progress against the action plan and set goals for the following week.
• The weekly meetings are comprised of staff across functions, finance, procurement, HR. This is the first time that such close cooperation has happened.
• Staff across the finance function are now highly aware of the need to spot duplication and waste in processes. They are encouraged to come up with improvement suggestions in their own areas.
• The Process Champions have developed their skills and experience through knowledge transfer with Sysdoc consultants, further training and taking part in this exercise.