Real World Examples of Discovering and Improving Processes

Change of Address Request: BPMN Model & Simulations

A Jump-Start on BPMN Modeling

BPMN is the standard for business process modeling, but business analysts are frequently at a loss for where to begin their process modeling efforts. To help jump-start BPMN process modeling and analysis efforts, we are supplying a set of pre-built models and simulations for popular processes. These models were built through real-world process improvement engagements. These models are not expected to match your organizations own processes, but should help you get a head start on your modeling and process improvement efforts. To help you better understand the models, simulation results, and improvement reports, this companion guide will offer a summary of the business situation that established their creation.

Change of Address at Bigger Bank

Bigger Bank is a large financial institution located in the United States that has over 850,000 customers. Each year, 14% of the U.S. population will move resulting in over 120,000 change of address (COA) requests that need to be processed at Bigger Bank. As the banks business continues to grow and customers expand the number of accounts they hold, the COA process needs to be streamlined to expedite requests and reduce overall processing costs. Bigger Bank knew that having the current mailing address of their customers was fundamental to their marketing efforts, receiving timely payments, and the overall happiness of their customers. Because of the growing demand for COA services and its importance to customer satisfaction, the organization decided to fund a project to improve the COA process at the bank. The COA team represents a significant investment of resources with 20 customer advocates and 5 individuals on the help desk. Improving the return on investment began by clearly defining goals for this team:

4-hour average work-in-progress time for COA requests 16-hour SLA being met on COA processing at least 80% of the time Costs not to exceed $1 for processing COA requests 9000 COA requests completed on average each month

Following process discovery, the Business Analyst created a model of the current on-boarding process.

Understanding and Validating the Current COA Process

Beginning with a process discovery session with the COA related staff, a business process analyst at Bigger Bank used Visio to quickly visualize the current process (as-is) used to process requests. Next, the business process analyst incorporated additional detail into the model, including: process activity, participants, resources, time requirements, costs, etc. The details were paired with the model using a Visio plug-in named analystView that helps simulate and report on the performance and cost of processing requests. To ensure the model accurately reflected the operations at Bigger Bank, the process analyst simulated the current process map to validate his diagram with the COA
What-if scenarios were used by the Business Process Analyst to compare process improvement alternatives.

processing organization and other stakeholders. When the staff verified that the simulation matched real-world operations, the business analyst understood they had created a good baseline for accessing process improvement recommendations.

Improving the COA Process

Next, the process analyst wanted to explore alternatives to improve processing of COA requests. By visually assessing the process model and holding discussions with the stakeholders involved, it was evident that several departmental tasks could be performed in parallel, accelerating their completion rate. By using what-if simulation scenarios, the business analyst was able to determine that validating account records against the customers COA form was increasingly a bottleneck for the organization and needed to be streamlined. Next, using the optimization-wizard feature of Visios analystView plug-in, other improvements were identified where crosstraining could alleviate some of the resource constraints while dramatically improving the ability to meet the goals established by the organization.

Contribute Your Own If you have developed a BPMN model of your own and would like to share it with other Business Analyst and process enthusiasts, or if you make significant improvements to models described here, Global 360 would love to hear from you. Please submit your template set to ContributeMyOwn@ global360.com. Each template set should offer a minimum of a valid BPMN model and companion guide that explains its business use scenario (similar to the content you have read above). Template sets that include a companion guide and current & future state models with embedded simulations are preferred. After a review session by our Product Management team, we will publish your template in our library, identify you as the author, and promote its free availability to the community.

Measured Results of Improving the COA Process

The BPMN process discovery, modelling and simulation exercise at Bigger Bank provided a clear understanding of their current (as-is) COA process and specified changes that could be made to dramatically improve the rate and cost of processing operations. With these specific changes in place, Bigger Banks revised (to-be) COA process resulted in:

Average completion time of 1.8 hours, well below the 4 hour goal and the 22.4 hour as-is time SLA completion rates of 79% Cost per claim below the goal of $1.00 at $0.78 A dramatic increase of 122% in COA completion capacity to 20,000 per month

Software Requirements
The current and future state process models used in this scenario are visible to anyone with access to Visio 2007 or greater. In order to access the native BPMN stencils and process simulation, Visio Premium 2010 and its analystView simulation plug-in are required. If you do not currently own Visio or analystView, free 60-day trials of the software are available at:

http://visiotoolbox.com/2010/trial-downloads.aspx http://www.global360.com/products/process-discovery-analysis

For more information on the BPMN Process Models and simulations, please contact us at info@global360.com

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