How Workflow Automation Accelerated Family Building Society Processes, Part 3

Two-day workshop

That next stage? A two-day workshop held onsite at the Society. The first day was spent identifying the initial elements that must be created before a user can begin working on any automation functionalities. This included creating basic objects, like partitions, that one would need to automate a process.

After this part of the workshop, they started diving deeper into the actual mortgage redemption process. Workshop participants, with Mitratech’s guidance, began from a step-by-step checklist.

“We started by creating an e-form in Datastore Workflow automation with all the fields necessary for the checklist,” said Ben Motteram, Director of Client Services at Mitratech. “The team from Mitratech created just a few fields on the form to show them how it was done.”  Then the Family Building Society team started to build out the form.  This was a way to both train the team while building out the actual workflows they’d employ.

The results?

The Family Building Society team was strategically selected to represent a range of skills and experience. Dan Condon, Business Transformation Manager at Family Building Society, said that “we chose such a broad mix of people to see what sort of programming knowledge might be needed for this.”

What they found surprised them. “Everyone was able to pick up on DataStore’s workflow automation within a day or two. It’s very intuitive and doesn’t really require training,” he said.

At the end of the two-day workshop, Family Building Society had created an integration into their banking system, a simple online form they could build upon as they see fit, and a basic end-to-end process the form could flow through. In essence, they now had the basic building blocks to create their own workflows.

As of right now, the Society is well down the path of creating and refining a workflow capable of shortening the process of getting a mortgage redemption figure back to the customer by upwards of 95% – from two to three days to just two hours, in other words.

“These numbers are so big that they can be hard to believe,” Dan Condon said.  “But I’m convinced that with Mitratech’s help, that goal is attainable.”

More than a single process

For Family Building Society, this was never about building a single workflow to replace a single process. Instead, it was the first step to transform how they did business overall. “We wanted to pick a single process, pilot test it, then use the results to show it could be done,” according to Dan Condon. That’s a key goal in automating this first process; once it was done, the next, and the next after that, would be even easier.

Ben Motteram says that “with the completion of that first process, they will have generic work queues and generic notifications they can reuse, as well as a library of objects.”

The first step toward a paperless (but people-centric) future

Automating the mortgage redemption process?  That’s only the first phase of a longer-term plan that the Family Building Society has planned. “We’re going to automate our loan application process and go completely paperless,” explained Dan Condon. Right now, a loan application process can well be over 100 pages. “To get all that paper and information ingested into DataStore is a huge job, but the benefits are huge,” he said.

Ultimately, though, Family Building Society is looking to completely transform the back office, automating as many tasks as they can. The potential for reducing SLAs and completely changing how they do business is massive, enabling them to be on a more level playing field with the big banks.

But one thing automation is not about? Reducing the number of employees or FTEs. “We need to do more with the same number of people, and paperless workflows allow us to do just that,“ Dan Condon emphasized. “What automation means to us is less time on the administrative part and more time on the human touch, the element we’re known for.”

To read Part 1 in this series, look right here. For Part 2, go here.