Success stories
Finance Industry: Application Processing
Financial organization reduces costs and creates process measurement tools with IBM WebSphere® Business Integration Workbench and IBM MQ Workflow
Scenario:
A leading financial organization recognized the vital importance of customer satisfaction to its standing in its industry. Customers expect high service quality for competitive fees. The organization's objectives were to reduce costs and create tools to measure product-support quality, processing productivity, and employee utilization.
Objectives:
Develop and implement an application-processing, workflow-management system that would allow imaged mail to be electronically routed for real-time, on-line processing, and create performance measures and management controls.
IBM solution:
Develop and implement a custom-built workflow- and monitoring-management system that automatically routes application- and support-information images to business teams and individuals. IBM provided expert support in business process modeling, workflow integration, WebSphere Business Integration Monitor development and system training.
Overview and results:
Our client was faced with many processing and management issues associated with the receipt of contract correspondence. These issues included adhering to customer-service standards and processing turn-around times, complying with state and federal laws and generating meaningful management information.
The support teams were dedicated by contract and request type; each team supported a unique aspect of contract modification or funds disbursement. Thus, each team's activities had to be measured individually within its own processing characteristics.
The first task was to create the organization's current-process model, which included the process' specific task intervals and cost metrics. Once the current process was understood and metrics compiled for benchmarking, the process was reviewed and streamlined to meet the company's goals of reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction.
The regional business units elected to use a corporate business team to oversee the project and to serve as project contacts for the business units. IBM worked with this team and respective Subject Matter Experts to build a business process model that would be used to design and develop a candidate solution.
The new model allowed for the use of workflow and information technology that would route pieces of correspondence to the appropriate support team or individual. The customer previously implemented the IBM FlowMark® workflow engine and intended to increase the scope of the workflow solution to the entire process--expanding it from the small portions that were then implemented.
Implemented technology:
The technology used to provide this solution was the WebSphere Business Integration Workbench for process design and analysis. The next phase of the project included the implementation of the redesigned process on the WebSphere MQ Workflow engine with the WebSphere Business Integration Monitor as the process-management tool.
Customer benefits:
The implementation of these changes is expected to produce an estimated annual savings of $300,000. These results were calculated from standard cost estimates for the working time of employees who performed the tasks. The customer used the savings (calculated in WebSphere Business Integration Workbench) to start a larger-than-intended workflow project.
