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South Africa's Nedbank Limited had a need to fully automate complex and labor-intensive business processes and centralize its credit business through BPM. It wished to increase customer satisfaction and improve service levels, reducing processing costs through continuous process improvements.
Upon completing its BPM automation, the bank reduced the time required to process an application from as much as two days to two hours in 80% of the cases. The volume of applications have tripled, but the bank now manages the increased requests without an increase in headcount; it reports that 95% of applications are approved or denied with an hour.
The bank reports that a key in achieving its success started with its view of knowledge and knowledge management: what it is and why it is important.
It started with realizing that it is not always easy to externalize tacit knowledge (existing in people's minds) into explicit knowledge (existing in hard-copy form), as people interpret information differently, have different levels of education, knowledge and experience.
The knowledge that becomes embedded in documents, repositories, processes, practices and norms in organizations, can be referred to as actionable information, but how that actionable information is interpreted is dependent on the individual.
Yet knowledge is increasingly becoming a primary source of wealth, as product and application know-how command a premium price. Given this fact, the company also realized that business processes are a company's highest-value assets, and need to be managed effectively to obtain maximum value.
An end-to-end knowledge of the business processes that integrate the business and underlying technical infrastructure is critical, and the most effective way to retain end-to-end knowledge in a rapidly accessible and understood form is to externalize tacit knowledge into a knowledge management system that provides actionable information within the relevant context.
Additionally, as it may not always be evident when knowledge has become obsolete and needs to be removed from the knowledge base, it might be necessary to include a version-control facility in the system to hide perceived outdated knowledge without deleting it completely. Everyone in the organization is responsible for reporting inaccurate or outdated knowledge in the knowledge system, so that it can be maintained and kept accurate and up to date.
So, although technologies and structures may support knowledge creation, retention, dissemination and application, they cannot change or direct company cultures or employee values. The knowledge must also be easily transferable between varying business units and processes, with the required security mechanisms to maintain competitive advantage by reducing the chances of leaking proprietary information and knowledge.
This article is based on a paper developed by Grant Preston Fourie. |
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