The Long and Winding (Paperless) Road to Workflow Improvement

Credit Union Journal
January 23, 2012 | COMMENTS

Workflows are the satisfying conclusion to a long journey that began with a paperless project at Alliant Credit Union in Chicago, said Heather Lally, senior manager, business process improvement.

"We've been doing a good job with imaging since 2005 and more than 95% of the credit union’s documents are now electronic,” said Lally. "But we wanted to do more than store document images."

In April, Alliant deployed OnBase ECM from Hyland Software, allowing the credit union to stop printing documents and instead access them electronically from multiple systems, she said.

Workflows were the logical next step, but something stood in the way: Alliant's culture lacked a commitment to process improvement, according to Rudy Pereira, recently senior vice president of technology and operations at Alliant and now CEO at Royal Credit Union in Wisconsin.

Alliant didn't have the talent or the organizational culture to drive quality and automation" until 2009, said Pereira. "We started up Six Sigma and service-level agreements across the organization. We created a business process improvement department. We were then ready and committed to continuous process and quality improvement."

Credit unions may hesitate to spend money moving beyond document imaging into ECM and workflows.

"Workflow is a huge part of the value that ECM provides," said Steve Comer, credit union industry manager for Hyland Software. "But it's more difficult to justify the spend for workflow" than for paperless.

Credit unions that have evaluated the cost savings and member service benefits know that a workflow solution is worth the price tag, he continued.

"For example, it may cost $50,000 for a workflow solution to automate invoice processing," Comer explained. "But if it currently takes three AP clerks to do the daily processing at an average salary of $35,000 a year, and you're able to reallocate one of those employees by automating the process, then your complete ROI on that solution is less than two years."

This article appeared at www.cujournal.com and is reprinted with permission.