Do you need to accelerate your
IT and back office cost reduction programmes?
Perhaps
the following issues are familiar to you?
In
response to 'credit crunch',
you now need to make significant cost reductions in your IT and back
office costs. Your current initiatives will not deliver significant
savings within the aggressive timescales that you need to work
to.
You've
invested significant resources in Lean and Six Sigma
initiatives,
they had some good results initially, but now you are bogged down and
struggling to deliver meaningful results.
You've
outsourced significant operations and enjoyed significant cost
reductions. However, service quality is now an issue and it's difficult
to make changes without incurring significant 'change request' charges.
You
have offshored key IT and service support operations. The processes
worked fine as originally defined. However, you are now faced
with requests for significant headcount
increases offshore to make up for operational efficiency and service
quality problems.
Your
current cost reduction
strategy for IT and back office operations is dependent on making
further large-scale investments in IT. Your CFO is concerned that this
approach requires too much capital expenditure, is too high risk and
the benefits are too far off.
Are
you wondering how you can transform your situation to get back on track?
How can you transform this
difficult situation?
Would you try and eat soup with a steak
knife? Of
course not. However, in our experience the strategies and techniques
being most frequently applied to improve operational effectiveness in
IT and back office operations within financial institutions just don't
work. 'Lean' and 'Six Sigma' techniques have delivered incredible
results in many automotive and other manufacturing businesses. However,
they are not well suited to IT and service processes. Typically,
financial institutions deploying Lean and Six Sigma based approaches
are able to harvest the 'low-hanging fruit' but then struggle to make
any further meaningful productivity improvements regardless of the
number of 'master black belts' they deploy.
Research proves
that strategic projects are most at risk from issues that can
be readily resolved.
Such issues include inadequate resourcing, deploying
appropriate process management and project execution disciplines, difficulties in scope and requirements management and most challenging of all successful stakeholder management (see 'Turning Great
Strategy into Great Performance' by M. Mankins & R. Steele,
Harvard
Business Review, July 2005).
Delivering
significant productivity improvements to IT and back office operations
successfully doesn’t have to be over complicated. Nor
does it have to be a struggle. Actually, in most cases, simpler
approaches are the ones most frequently overlooked. But these are the
only ones most likely to work. Of course, a simple approach is only
simple
when you know the right questions to ask and you know what to do with
the answers. And, the path is a lot more enjoyable when you can see
progress right away. Sounds impossible? It’s not.
If it's 'straightforward' to
put things right, then why haven't you done so already?
Delivering strategic projects within back office
and IT operations is a difficult, high-risk endeavour.
Everyone knows that the capability to translate 'strategy' into
'execution' is critical to business performance, but that doesn’t make
it easy. Far from it. The failure rate on strategic projects can run as
high as 60-80% (see the Working Council for CFOs at
www.executiveboard.com).
Many
financial institutions turn to large, global technology firms for
advice in how to reduce technology costs. It
shouldn't be surprising that they frequently advise you to undertake
large-scale complex IT programmes requiring significant investments on
your part. Alternative strategies that emphasise simpler, lower cost
approaches that still deliver significant cost reductions can often be
overlooked.
Banks
are a lot more complicated than car assembly plants. Strategies, tools and techniques that work in car
plants may not work as well in financial services. Complex regulatory
and compliance obligations, 'invisible' products and services rather
than physical products and dependency on large-scale IT legacy systems
all combine to make delivering meaningful productivity and cost
reduction in financial services supreme challenges.
You
can increase IT & back office productivity significantly whilst
improving service.
To
transform your situation successfully means you need to focus on the
'vital few' critical interventions that will make a difference. Having the necessary IT, back office process and
specialist financial services business expertise enables us to get to
the bottom of critical issues
for you and then help you get what needs to be done resolved quickly.
The primary cost
driver in service processes is complexity. We
help you apply powerful tools that help you eliminate complexity from
your service processes and eliminate the root causes of much of the
non-value added work within your service processes.
Typically 50-70% of
activities and costs related to service processes are
'non-value-added'.
We help you focus your service processes on delivering high customer
value-added activities and eliminate non-value added activities.
Bottom-line, you can
expect a 10-15% reduction in your overall spending on IT and back
office operations.
City Process Management has the
exceptional track record you need
We specialise in working with the senior executives
of leading financial institutions who need to overcome difficult
situations. We've worked
closely with leaders of some of the world's most successful financial
institutions including AXA, Barclays, Capital One, Citicorp and
Nationwide Building Society.
Our focus has been on helping them deliver critical business and
technology projects. We've helped clients deliver strategic projects
that:
- Reduced IT shared services
costs by 25%.
- Improved productivity and
service quality from 'offshore' operations dramatically.
- Reduced operating costs in Call
Centre operations by 15-25%.
- Accelerated critical
infrastructure implementations required to be in place for major
business initiatives.
- Implemented large-scale IT
programmes to replace the core systems infrastructure supporting
millions of customers.
You can learn more on how we've
helped clients succeed by reading our case studies by CLICKING HERE.
YOUR NEXT STEP - Find out how
we've helped other senior executives like you
We've
helped leading business leaders achieve remarkable results.
Perhaps
the best way to judge the contribution that we can make to your success
is to hear directly from our clients describing how we've helped them
be successful.
Our
turnaround contributions include:
- Helping deliver
critical IT and business projects that enabled Andy
Homer to turning around AXA UK from losses of over £100 million to
profitability.
- Implementing
strategic projects to reduce operating costs significantly and improve
customer service that helped Philip Rowley transform
AOL Europe from losses of over $600 million into profitability.
- Helping Joe Ripp
improve business operations in his US and European businesses and his
offshore operations in India that made a vital business contribution to
the performance improvements that merited the increase
of specialist outsourcer Dendrite International's share price
from $8 to $16 within a year.
You
can hear and learn from these senior executives as they personally
discuss the situation, key issues and challenges they faced and the
success they enjoyed by CLICKING HERE.
You might well be wondering
whether we can help you with your particular situation. The following
section, IS THIS YOU?, might help
you to determine that we possibly can.