Britannia

Business Process improvement using Simulation

Founded in 1856, the Britannia Building Society has grown on the principles of mutuality by putting its members first. The Britannia Building Society offers a range of mortgages, loans and other financial products and, through responsible lending principles, claims to have one of the lowest arrears and repossession rates in the industry.

The challenge

Due to a recent acquisition to support growth plans, Britannia was reviewing operational efficiency. In particular, it needed to ensure that its new business and servicing capability for savings and mortgages was robust enough to absorb the increase in workload from its acquisition. The primary business motivation was the need to maintain competitive customer servicing levels.

Customer contact workload can be challenging to predict because volumes are influenced by external factors such as market sentiment, seasonal (even daily) consumer behaviour patterns and marketing events.

Furthermore economic factors, for example base rate changes, regulatory requirements and independent product reviews can also have a direct and significant impact particularly within financial services. It can therefore be business critical to plan flexibility and contingency into resource availability to meet customer demand.

Britannia was looking to get a good handle on its existing back office business processes. It wanted to understand the impact of event-driven surges in workload and resource downtime on its customer service levels. It also needed to understand how quickly the business could recover to normal operating levels after such events.

The solution

To assist Britannia achieve its objectives, CACI worked with Britannia’s service delivery team to develop a clear understanding of its current processes and service levels. Based on this understanding, CACI used its business process simulation application to develop a detailed simulation of the business process. The model was benchmarked against historic performance measures.

Once an accurate baseline model was achieved, CACI and Britannia simulated various business workload scenarios and predicted the subsequent impact on customer service levels. These included increases in new business applications and unavailability of resources (e.g. of staff or systems) for periods of time. Bottlenecks and strategies to improve service levels were identified using the simulation model.

The results and benefits

CACI delivered the simulation models and results for specified workload scenarios. In particular, CACI was able to demonstrate the following:

	The impact on service levels when the business experiences a surge in new business volumes for a predetermined period of time.
	The length of time that would be typically taken to clear the resulting backlog at business as usual staffing levels.
	The effect on business as usual workload during system down times

CACI further demonstrated to the client the benefits of implementing workload prioritisation policies. It was shown that using simple prioritisation can have a ignificant impact on Britannia’s ability to recover service levels following a surge in customer demand.

"Building a simulation model with CACI has identified a number of areas where significant improvements could be made in the mortgage application process and as a result we are expanding the scope of the project to include additional processes and other areas of the business. Simulation will become a key tool in the analysis and design of new and existing business processes for Britannia."

- Phil Garlick, Head of Membership Services Britannia

To find out more about our work with Britannia either call 020 7602 6000 or email info@caci.co.uk