Situation: After 10 years of a successful cooperation a vendor of the Sales Department became the single largest vendor for the whole company. This was also the moment when it became clear that there had never been any Request for Proposal (RFP) for the vendor and that there was no vendor management process in place.

Problem: The department was exposed to a significant operational and financial risk and received a negative audit comment.

Task: There was an urgent need to perform the complete RFP, agree on the whole set of the SLAs and KPIs as well as establish a management process.

Solution: An extensive satisfaction survey (voice of the customer, VOC) was gathered to understand the baseline and the existing deficiencies. This VOC served later as the basis for the creation of SLAs. Upon the RFP, the conditions were negotiated with the winning vendor. The winner committed to the set of KPIs and SLAs. As the last step, the formal review process with a respective Bonus / Malus Agreement was put in place.

Result: In addition to bringing in the structure and closing the audit issue, the customer satisfaction was increased immediately by 5 p.p. and the vendor cost declined by 17%.

Situation: For the Collections Department of a bank there was a call-center operator in place, who took care of a very large volume of defaulting clients.

Problem: It became apparent that the vendor was not performing and, due to its geographical location, was also expensive and generally difficult to deal with. 

Task: The decision was made to replace the vendor. However, as the vendor was supporting the running operations, the transfer had to take place seamlessly for the customer and with minimal disturbance for the operations.

Solution: Upon a rigorous process a new vendor was selected. In order to minimize operational disruption a staged transfer and hand-over process was suggested. Parallel to an intensive training on the premises of the bank the vendor infrastructure was prepared. 

Result: The vendor transfer was a success. The Collections Department continued functioning throughout the transition. Cost saving of over 20% could be achieved. On top of that the vendor management load was reduced significantly.

Situation: In a very quickly growing organisation within the sector of financial services a set of obligatory regulatory reportings was overlooked and so not performed.

Problem: The Regulator notified the organisation of their noncompliance, and there was a risk of paying a high fine. At the same time, there was no internal knowledge on the specifics of this reporting inhouse.

Task: The assignment was twofold. While the internal reporting knowledge had to be generated, a reliable reporting process had to be put in place as soon as possible. On top of that, the long-overdue reports had to be submitted.

Solution: As this reporting was intradepartmental, roles and responsibilities were negotiated and agreed upon, and the subject matter expertise was accumulated. The end-to-end processes for all types of reporting were defined and automation or partial automation was put in place where applicable. Handbooks and workflows were written to assure adequate knowledge management. These were the basis for extensive employee training. Finally, routines were put in place to be able to stay compliant going forward.

Result: The reporting process was successfully implemented. The submitted reporting output was to the satisfaction of the Regulator, and no fines had to be paid.

Situation: An organisation was going through a major post-merger transition, which had implications for the operational backbone.

Problem: Due to the transition and a major shift in the mission statement, there was an increased friction in the operations department, which resulted in a decline of productivity and general dissatisfaction.

Task: The department had to be brought in sync with the new mission and value system.

Solution: A series of workshops with the employees was performed to translate the new values into tangible and measurable department goals. Handbooks and processes were adjusted accordingly, and the department staff was provided with training. 

Result: The translation of new company values and their integration into the department goals was successful. The productivity of the department rose, and with that the employee satisfaction.