PROBLEM The CEO of Montrusco Bolton compared their operations with industry benchmarks and realized that increasing the size of the back office would have resulted in a higher cost of operations than benchmark for investment managers. The back office was already working overtime regularly.  APPROACH With cognitive analysis, Cognitive Group was able to analyze how employees process information, what problems were encountered and the impacts on operation costs. It was discovered that 50% of the workload in the back office was due to subtle but preventable human errors from the front office. Many of these errors had not been detected with traditional means of observation.  Thirty causes of errors were identified. Of those 30 causes, 5 error types represented 80% ...

PROBLEM The account manager complained for years that the loan origination system was difficult to use. There was no hard factual data that could justify an investment in improving the Loan Origination System (LOS). Consequently, improving the LOS was not part of the time saving programs.  APPROACH This project began with a field study using cognitive analysis to gather facts on the current process.  Twenty account managers, risk managers and back-office employees were met and observed. Cognitive Group was able to analyze how employees processed information, what problems were encountered and the impacts on operation costs. A total of 88 error types were uncovered that caused lost productivity and delays costing $30 million per year. RESULTS Based on Cognitive Group’s ...

PROBLEM The renewal process represents 40% of the account manager workload. Fifteen percent of files were past due.  APPROACH We did a cognitive analysis of risk managers, account managers and back office employees.  It was found that the bottleneck was the risk rating process.  The key findings were: 1) The Moody’s RiskCalc™ took lots of time because the account manager had to enter over 30 entries and navigate through 10 pages.  2) The approach of calculating the debt services varied from region to region. Debt service is the biggest contributor for evaluating the Borrower Risk Rating (BRR). A discrepancy of just 2bps in pricing represented a loss of $10 million per year.  3) The management evaluation by the account manager was subjective, ...

SITUATION RBC, (TSE:RY), Canada largest Bank and one of world’s largest financial institution  moved away from paper and microfilm. RBC the leading Canadian financial institution. RBC employs more than 80,000 full and part-time employees who serve more than 17 million clients RBC is has three division , Banking, Investing and Insurance. At the heart of the imaging operation, there is an imaging technology. IBM warned their customer they will no longer support the current version of “IBM Content Manager”. Consequently, Royal Bank felt compel to upgrade to the new version of Content Manager. The new version was a complete revamp. Executive were suspicious that the new user interface might impact the operation and involve change issues. There was 5% of ...

SITUATION Adjudicators lose time going over 30 pages on an information systems. This results in increased cognitive load and increased risk.  Adjudicators had to take notes of relevant information and search for more detailed explanation across the application and the imaging systems. SOLUTION Understanding the human factors of the decision making task allowed users to capture key information necessary to make a decision and devise a summary that helped  them drill down when they need more details. RESULT Incredible simplification that went from 30 pages to a two pages summary.  Adjudicators only need one click to drill to detailed information saving,  20% of their  time and preventing risk of missing key information. Adjudicators also experienced a reduces risk of “Cognitive ...

SITUATION 50% of the loan applications had to be resubmitted. Why: sale representatives were omitting documents and explanations, using the wrong rule for income calculation, making entry or calculation errors. During negotiations, they were changing parameters that do not affect risk, such as reducing interest rates or the loan amount. This resulted in resubmission, delay and lower client satisfaction. SOLUTION The human factors study of the end to end process revealed the nature of human errors and necessary corrective actions. It was recommended that guidance be provided as follows: in the short term with Excel and Checklist , and by improving guidance and support to the current mortgage system. RESULT We tested a prototype and found that 50% of all ...