We’d like to take you on a brief “tour” of the typical credit union “factories.”
See if you recognize yours!
The role of this “factory” is to handle in-person transactions, sales, and service—including drive-throughs and ATMs.
In a classic industrial network, each factory is located close to its essential resources and high-potential markets: members, labor, transport hubs, etc. Are your branch network “factories” ideally positioned to capture and service profitable growth?
And industrial factories are staffed based on planned production volumes. The “workflow lines” are “balanced.” Everyone knows the objectives: Zero wasted effort. No idle time. No scrap product. No rework. Sure, these goals are aspirational, but they deliver continuous gains in productivity and quality.
How well does your retail branch network footprint align with the likely demographic growth? How does each branch staffing plan align with the predictable transaction “production” required? Are branches over- or under-staffed? Are the hours of each branch fine-tuned to predictable member traffic—in real time? Are you aligning product promotions with the likely audience for each branch?
Think: What’s the ideal input, or “raw material,” for this factory? Rigorously qualified, prioritized prospects for your credit union’s products and services, located in the market segments where you hold a competitive advantage.
Conversely, what “raw materials” should get rejected at the inbound “receiving dock”? Exactly the opposite: Random, “hope-based” leads.
The typical credit union lending sales “factory” possesses a rich, untapped “inventory” of data on existing members, their profitability, industries, and locations. Use these to prioritize (and automate!) marketing, prospecting, and selling processes. Even the highest-performing Relationship Managers, armed with the latest CRM technology, typically lack the resources and insights that define the best- and worst-performing:
That’s costly: First, roughly 20 percent of all business is unprofitable. Second, manual prospecting is slow, expensive, and inefficient. Combine these two facts, and you’re paying top dollar to prospect for unprofitable business! Do less. Earn more!
Find more detailed info about the Lending Sales Factory HERE
Could you imagine a car factory where nearly half of the parts arriving on the assembly line were already defective—and required repair by the assembly workers?
But in the intangible world of credit union knowledge work, this is exactly what happens in lending fulfillment. Even on your best day, 35 percent of your commercial loan applications arrive “not in good order” or NIGO—an avoidable situation that results in costly errors, delays, and member frustration.
And what does a bad day look like? Eighty percent NIGO!
Wouldn’t you love to eliminate those inbound mistakes and redundancies, i.e., the NIGO scrap pile?
Wouldn’t you love to automate a ton of this process?
Find more detailed info about the Lending Fulfillment Factory HERE
You’ve centralized that back office. Smart, dedicated workers toil daily to “feed the machine”…
No, make that “machines.” Lots of them. Core systems. “Miracle” applications. That don’t talk to each other. Creating mountains of mindless sit-at-the-computer work: checking, reconciling, scraping, copying, pasting.
Your employees are “connectors”—human glue.
Here’s a hint: The solution to this “production-line bottleneck” isn’t entirely human…
Your credit union runs a variety of “support group factories.” The Finance Factory is one of the most important examples. This is your credit union’s “reporting factory.” It needs to run like clockwork. But instead, it’s a deadline-sweating, fire-fighting epicenter of quietly routine chaos: Rework, reconciliation, and ad hoc reporting.
The Finance Factory should be turning out profitable “products” that help managers reduce margin leakage from unprofitable products (think loan spreads); costly, unproductive producers; and under-performing branches.
These “products” should “laser-guide” the efforts of your Lending Sales Factory.
Finance should be the simplest factory in your credit union. It should be harnessing that untapped inventory of member and product data gathering dust in your core systems. It should already be humming along smoothly, with minimal staffing, and never missing a beat. You know it isn’t. So what’s missing…?
What do you and Henry Ford have in common? The timeless opportunity to standardize. That’s where the ideas for factories—and work automation—are always born. Whether it’s mechanical or digital automation, whether it’s manual or knowledge work, it all begins with standardizing the activities for “machinability.”
It’s not impossible. In fact, it’s straightforward. As the industry’s sole standardization specialist, The Lab can help you turbocharge these “factories,” through our patented Knowledge Work Standardization® methodology.
This eliminates the rework, redundancy, and disorder that drag down performance and member experience. It replaces tribal knowledge and rules-of-thumb with best practice standards that slash costly variance.
And it paves the way for jaw-dropping business intelligence (BI) visualizations that empower instant, inarguable decision-making. And robotic process automation (RPA), or bots, that not only handle the drudge work with speed and accuracy, but provide a game-changing advantage in everything from processing to prospecting.
Want to see how The Lab has been transforming credit union “factories” for 25-plus years—and how we can help yours to “boost production,” too?
It’s easy. We can show you in a simple 30-minute screen-sharing demo.
You’ll see how we accomplish all this remotely, from our U.S. offices in Houston.
You’ll see how our results self-fund in six months or less, guaranteed.
Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to get started now.
