University Improves Efficiencies and Customer Responsiveness through Business Process Transformation

An administrative department of a major university was experiencing increased work volumes and handling intervals.
Work assignment structure, manual work steps, and multiple handoffs created sub-optimal processes. Customer responsiveness and operational effectiveness suffered.

Northridge was engaged to examine baseline operations, assess against best practices, identify improvement opportunities and create a roadmap for implementation.
- Identified root cause of process issues by determining primary work drivers; analyzing y/y volume changes, with trends by month, team member and function; and examining metrics for processing intervals.
- Designed process improvements to minimize manual steps, reduce handoffs, create a less paper-intensive environment and more effectively utilize existing system capabilities.
- Created a “force to load” staffing model and redistributed work functions across team members to enable greater flexibility in handling peak periods and more effectively address backlogs.
- Established improved tracking and reporting of performance metrics, creating superior management visibility.
Within two months of project completion, team role revisions and process changes were implemented and manual steps were reduced by 38% in Process A (shown in the graph to the left) which dramatically reduced backlogs and improved job satisfaction and customer responsiveness.

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