The Challenge

A Tier 1 Canadian Financial Institution conducts collection operations to cure client debt either through internal efforts or by assigning delinquent accounts to external agencies or law firms.

The Collection Department had challenges with effectively managing their end-to-end collection operations and strategies due to lack of documentation, process transparency and maturity. The misalignment of roles and responsibilities, inefficient process execution and duplication of effort within the department, and inability to identify improvement opportunities were some of the critical business concerns.

Hence, the FI engaged the Carly Rian Group (CRG) to support building a foundation for improved operations through process maturity. CRG was asked to determine, document, and analyze high-risk processes and identify and implement solutions to contribute to the department’s operational effectiveness.

The Approach

To help the client achieve their objective, CRG developed and executed a three-phased program approach:

Mobilize and Prioritize:

• Conducted workshops with the department’s senior leaders to develop a high-level operations inventory list, including people, process, and technology
• Prepared an end-to-end cross-sectional view of people, process and technology
• Developed a process risk assessment matrix and evaluated each operational unit’s scope against the risk criteria to prepare a process maturity roadmap

Document and Assess:

• Conducted interviews with tactical and operational level resources, and managers to document the high priority processes in actionable detail
• Identified process issues and gathered data to evaluate impact of the inefficiencies
• Developed process maturity enhancement recommendations and their implementation roadmap

Validate and Implement:

• Gathered detailed data to validate the feasibility of recommendations prepared by CRG and solutions identified by the client
• Assessed change requirements and developed detailed future state designs
• Tested future state designs to validate their benefits and risks
• Implemented validated solutions by developing tools to support the changes, providing training, and supporting the stabilization of changes

The Outcome

The following deliverables were developed throughout 18 months of engagement:

• A complete operations inventory with a list of 600+ procedures with their risk categories, list of technologies utilized within the Collections Department and their objectives, as well as a list of roles and their job ratings within the department
• Developed standardized, detailed cross-functional process maps outlining people, process, and technology for over 230 procedures and identified 120 qualitative and 114 quantitative opportunities that collectively could provide approximately 33,000 hours worth of effort savings annually
• Validated and tested feasibility of 11 recommendations and solutions
• Implemented changes for 4 processes and delivered benefits of 10+ FTE savings