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  • A 3-Step Guide to Future-Proofing Critical Processes

A 3-Step Guide to Future-Proofing Critical Processes

Explore how banks and credit unions can protect operations by mapping, documenting, and automating key processes.

Read Time
5 mins
Last updated
Oct 8th, 2024
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For bank and credit union leaders, it’s the stuff of nightmares.

One long-time employee maintains control over a key business process or function. With all that important knowledge residing within the brain of a single person, that individual has effectively created a moat of job security. They are indispensable to the organization and the proper working of that specific process.

That is, until one day that key employee doesn’t come in to work. Perhaps they are on a well-earned vacation or taking time off for family medical leave. Worse yet, they experience an urgent and sudden personal crisis that will make them unavailable for the foreseeable future, or unexpectedly leave their job entirely.

Relying on legacy manual processes increases risk

Staff are people, and life happens.

When a key employee leaves the organization for any length of time, they take with them a wealth of institutional knowledge. If that knowledge hasn’t been shared, documented, and (ideally) automated, the organization is taking on an undue level of risk.

Future Proof Critical Processes Guide

These risks include system downtime and workflow interruptions that may negatively impact workplace productivity, the customer/member experience, business continuity, revenue capture, growth, and profitability.

An over-reliance on specific individuals or even small teams that harbor detailed information about how processes work increases this organizational risk, while also impacting quality of life for staff, who may feel they can never take a vacation if they are the critical cog in the production wheel.

As a leader, it’s your role to ensure that life goes on in your organization, even as individual staff members come and go.

For example, before implementing workload automation, HAPO Community Credit Union was heavily reliant on legacy manual processes. Much of the Credit Union’s institutional knowledge resided with just a few individual experts who had been in the organization for years or even decades. If those subject matter experts were to get sick, go on vacation, or leave the Credit Union, their deep understanding of HAPO’s systems and processes could potentially be lost.

“As the new guy, I was dependent on people already here to communicate that knowledge to me and show me how things were done. Otherwise, it would have been very difficult for me to identify all of that information.”

– Robert Carter, Systems Engineering Manager at HAPO Community Credit Union

3 steps to future-proofing your organization

As a financial services organization, follow these three steps to ensure you maintain control of institutional knowledge and future-proof your business processes.

1. Identify your most critical processes

The first step is to figure out which of your daily, weekly, and monthly processes are most critical to the running of your business. For financial institutions, these include dozens of common customer-facing and back-office processes, including:

  • Customer onboarding and know your customer (KYC) compliance

  • Loan processing and underwriting

  • Deposit account opening

  • Check and ACH processing

  • Fraud monitoring and mitigation

  • Regulatory compliance reporting

  • Account reconciliation

  • Payments, Fedwire transfers, and Automated Clearing House (ACH) posting

  • Fee and interest calculation

  • Data analytics and reporting

  • Transaction posting and statement processing

Start by identifying which of these processes are most critical to your organization’s mission, and ask yourself, “What impact would it have if we lost the ability to perform this function for a day? A week? A month?”

2. Document every detail

Once you’ve identified your mission-critical processes, the next stage is to document and map every workflow step. Interview your key employees and take a “brain dump” of everything they know about the processes they own, from requesting reports and transferring files, to initiating code and signing into the third-party software they use to do their jobs. Create a flowchart to help uncover all potential scenarios and bottlenecks, along with any backup and failsafe protocols.

Once you’re done documenting the process, use this opportunity to identify and eliminate any redundancies and duplicative effort that can extend timelines and increase the likelihood of errors. Is the same data being entered into multiple cells or different pieces of software? Can certain steps be performed concurrently, instead of in sequence to save time?

“When it comes to streamlining operations, with the flowcharting we can now visually see the flow of jobs running through our system and that has exposed some complexity that was unneeded,” says Ed Watson, Systems Programmer for Ameritas. “For example, we discovered processes that have been around for years and people realized that we didn’t need to run those anymore.”

3. Automate everything you can!

A sure-fire way to mitigate the risk of institutional knowledge is automation. Once you’ve identified critical workflows and documented all the steps involved, it’s a relatively simple process to automate all routine and redundant manual steps.

Not only will automation help to capture institutional knowledge within the organization, it will also allow business staff to maintain control of their own processes while reducing reliance on IT through efficient, streamlined, and fool-proof features like Self-Service buttons.

One of the benefits of automation is that it forces the organization to have well-defined and documented processes. This, in turn, enables the institution to download expert knowledge that resides within the brains of one or a handful of individuals, ensuring it’s accessible to the entire organization.

“Organizations often rely on [institutional] knowledge over time—the passing down of information from [one] employee to [another],” HAPO’s Carter says. “When you’ve automated something within an organization like ours, you’ve documented that process for the future.”

Don’t let your organization’s intellectual property and institutional knowledge walk out the door with your staff. Take the time to future-proof your operations by mapping, documenting, and automating your key processes.

“With automation, people can actually take a vacation, which helps morale, too,” says Damien Burgess, IT System Analyst at Andrews Federal Credit Union. “Ultimately, automation impacts your employee experience as well.”

Looking to preserve institutional knowledge while relieving your employees’ stress levels (so they can take a real vacation)? The financial services automation experts at SMA Technologies can help! Contact us or request a demo today.

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