1. Measuring Drivers of Process
Efficiency and Effectiveness
AKA’s Discovery Method
May, 2012

2. AKA’s Discovery Method - a rapid “MRI” of any as-is
business process
 ANY process or “issue of interest”:
̶ Transactional (Underwriting, Claims, Order-to-cash)
̶ Customer facing (Call centers, customer service, field sales force)
̶ Knowledge Intensive (Systems Testing, Help Desk, Business analysis, etc.)
̶ Issues (e.g. drug rehab program managers, Customer QC, etc.)
 Uses existing process models or builds its own
 Calculates task frequency and level of effort
 At the point of task completion, collects information about task efficiency
and effectiveness drivers
 Delivers quantitative and qualitative process data, concurrently collected
 An effective resource for process analysis and design, opportunity
discovery and investment justification analyses
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3. How AKA’s Discovery method works
 Every time a participant performs a task we care about, we will know:
̶ How long did it take
 Thus, how much did it cost
̶ How often was it performed
̶ What initiated the task (project or initiative identifiers)
 As tasks are executed, Discovery asks questions about that instance
providing insights beyond simple task timings and costs. For example:
̶ Process Compliance questions allow us to know:
 What is the rate of task satisfaction and compliance; what drives exceptions: time
constraints, understanding of the task, acceptance of task’s utility, etc.
̶ Knowledge Management questions allow us to know:
 What are the knowledge content requirements of a task; how effectively does the current
process or tools enable use of knowledge; what are the issues resulting in knowledge gaps
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4. Discovery provides hard data to establish opportunities
in real, current, quantitative terms
KM impact thru meeting preparation
Discover & Adapt Internal Best Practices
50% reduction thru KM
Low impact internal meetings
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5. Case Example: Root Cause Discovery & Analysis
 Discovery: the 25% of bills were in paper form driving 62% of suspensions. Paper
bills take 2x as long to handle
Was source paper or electronic?
Data Electronic Paper Overall
Average Time 1.14 2.01 1.68
Pct of Units 38% 62% 100%
Num of Units 2,684 4,439 7,123
Avg Cost/unit $ 0.48 $ 0.84 $ 0.70
 Quantified the ROI of moving to 85/15 electronic to paper mix from 75/25
Current Future
Suspensions per year total 1,053,000 843,414
From paper 656,223 393,732
From electronic 396,777 449,682
Paper suspend process costs $ 553,005 $ 331,803
Electronic suspend process costs $ 188,829 $ 214,008
Total Process costs $ 741,834 $ 545,811
Savings $ 196,023
 Major productivity improvement for 30 person team
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6. Case Example: Reduce cycle time & accelerate loan
funding ($4 million revenue gain)
 Time Lag: Application Arrival to Satisfactory Valuation
16
14
14
13
12
Average lag: 9.0 days
12 Median lag: 7 days
10
10
9 Issue: 39% apps need valuation ordered by
8 operator at assessment
8 Too often operator fails to order valuation
Goal: Reduce average lag by 2 days by branch
6 ordering all valuations
5 Gain: loan starts 2 days earlier
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3 3 3
2 2
2
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0
Review Valuation
Group1
Days Lag: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 17 19 22 51 101
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7. Case Example: Knowledge Management leverage
opportunities
 80% of legal staff’s hours are spent on tasks with “High” improvement potential via
Knowledge Management
 Improvement Opportunities
1. Technologies that reduce the time to do tasks
2. Technologies that combine and collapse tasks
3. Technologies that improve meeting-related productivity and/or necessity of having
some meetings
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8. Discovery Metric Study – Three Step Process
TM
1. Front End Study Engineering: Setup Application (PC)
2. Data Collection: Virtual PDA on PC
1 – 2 weeks
2-3 days
1 hour training
+ Learning curve
3. Results Reporting
Clarifications Group Immediate
100
90
Method Summary – 80
36
38
1. Collect and re-use existing process models or create an as-is 70
process definition 60 22
# Activities Data Transfer Retrieve work item,
Apply the definition of as-is processes in the Discovery Tool 50 Process Item to res
Enter notes
2. Participants self-record process data using the Virtual PDA 40
31
28
application on their PC’s
26 15
30
Data collection is usually 1 week 14
6
20 10
3. Collected data is analyzed by Discovery’s powerful reporting 27 26 24
11
6
10 8
engine 6
2
14
10
7
8
4
4
4 3
0 1
Pre 8am 8-9 9-10 10-11 11-12 12-13 13-14 14-15 15-16 16-17 After
5pm
Hourly Time Slot 7

9. Next Steps
 Identify processes and functions in need of analysis
 Craft scope of a project
̶ As few as 10 to 20 participants, up to 100
̶ Select pilot focus
̶ Engineer, train, deploy, collect data and analyze/present results
 Contact AKA Group, LLC to find out how to get started
̶ Ira Feinberg Partner/Practice Lead (917) 705-4148
̶ Doug Brockway Partner (617) 834-0067
̶ Allan Frank CEO (610) 331-8484
̶ www.akaplex.com
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