A key component of a Modern Infrastructure that can be delivered standalone. Without workflow automation, management is blind to the most important set of cost metrics impacting the largest cost component of all financial service companies, STAFF. The employees salaries and benefits are by far the largest expense yet optics into their daily activities is typically limited. This important practice is rarely carried across the entire firm. What makes this practice even more important is the seasonality of the financial services industry where staff is typically strained at tax season, quarter and year-end cycles which also coincide with typical vacation cycles, compounding the issues. The solution is Workflow Automation where every process across the enterprise is automated. Ranging from one-step processes to complex managerial duties, everything can be part of a systemic workflow. This firm-wide approach provides optics into time-to-process of each step of each process for each employee while simultaneously improving average processing time of each workflow.

Perhaps most importantly, since each process step is timed, the overall efficiency of the workflow is known. This allows staff productivity comparisons and facilitates aligning incentives to real measures of efficiency. It also allows for accurate customer level profitability through the now known metrics of cost-per-customer. This set of metrics impacts everything from product pricing strategies, to volume discounting and employee incentives.

Another important benefit of workflow automation is standardization. Automating workflows allows the deployment and enforcement of the known best-practice. This can improve overall workflow efficiency, and decrease the ramp-up time of new hires. (Current employees spend less time on-boarding new employees, and removes the need to memorize all the steps required for each of their responsibilities.) Automation allows seasonality or vacation coverage from other departmental resources with like skills, regardless of one's familiarity with the process steps or workflow sequencing. Workflow automation removes this as a proficiency requirement. Significant time is also saved from employee to employee communications where questions and answered on sequencing or task details eat into productivity time.

Example

Old Approach: A manager asks for an additional resource and sites excessive working hours of the current staff as the rationale. Typically, this is enough to get the resource, and the cost escalation continues.

New Approach: A manager asks for an additional resource and an executive looks at the dashboard of staff activity. They realize there are under-utilized staff who can be assigned to help the over-capacitated department.

Reassignment saves the company the cost of additional resources. This is a very real scenario that regularly happens. It puts additional stress on margins and ultimately on marketing and sales departments to improve through scale.