 From an initial deployment within mortgage services and document management, use of Nuqleus has expanded into the savings and investments operations.
About the Cheshire Building Society
Since it was established in 1870 as one of the first Permanent Societies, Cheshire Building Society has made its commitment to world-class customer service the cornerstone of its success.
Now, as the 11th largest building society in the UK, it faces the challenges of the business landscape of the 21st century. A key driver in improving the Society’s efficiencies, and ensuring it continues to deliver outstanding service, has been the introduction of business software package Nuqleus.
In addition to its branch network the Cheshire’s eCommerce, Intermediary and Customer Contact Centre are key operating channels supported in the delivery of member focused products and services by the Membership Support teams at Head Office.
The Challenge
Nuqleus from XTAQ plays a role in a number of initiatives undertaken by the Cheshire to improve efficiency and services.
Steve Hilton, Head of Membership Support, comments “We knew that we needed to instigate changes in some of our operational processes but we didn’t know accurately how long stages of the process took and what additional activities people were doing that did not add value to the process.”
While the output was visible, the Society couldn’t see if people were carrying out the processes efficiently. Just asking questions led to more questions: Is it the right process, how long does each part of the process take? How often are they run? How much does it cost? Can we do it more efficiently and more effectively?
“We were unsure as to how we could measure this.” says Steve Hilton. While at a conference Steve heard XTAQ present the Nuqleus concept, and recognised that this concept reflected the things that the Cheshire wanted to understand at the time.
The Solution
Nuqleus is designed to help organisations understand, manage and improve their operational business intelligence and performance.
It does this by measuring and reporting the key metrics that define performance. Within the Cheshire Nuqleus was initially deployed as a three-month project aimed at making some processes more efficient and driving costs down. The information gathered during that project was used as the basis for implementing change.
Post-project Nuqleus was deployed to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the change. “That all worked well and we learned a lot from the project.” says Steve Hilton, “Later when we undertook analysis of workflow and a project to study the business benefits of scanning documents at the beginning of the process, we used Nuqleus to put together a business case to show the impact in terms of improved efficiency.”
We were unable to come up with anything that would offer as much as Nuqleus.
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To ensure that his team was using the best application for this purpose Steve Hilton researched the market to find an alternative for comparison, “We were unable to come up with anything that would offer as much as Nuqleus.” Says Steve, “So we used Nuqleus to measure productivity and effectiveness of the workflow before, during (to ensure that productivity levels remained high while the change took place) and after implementation of the change.”
Measurements taken as the new workflow was bedded in were important to the Cheshire to show whether the efficiencies had been delivered where they thought they would be.
Nuqleus and LeanSix
From an initial deployment within mortgage services and document management, use of Nuqleus has expanded into the savings and investments operations.
Over the last three years Nuqleus has played a key role in the Society’s “LeanSix” programme which analyses what the team does and why, in a bid to improve efficiency and resources so that it can offer a better more cost effective service to members.
It gives us a far better picture of workload, enabling us to take more control over our processes and costs
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Steve Hilton is in no doubt that Nuqleus delivered benefits from the very start, “In terms of workload management Nuqleus removed the need for people to manage multiple spreadsheets to count work in and out. It gives us a far better picture of workload, enabling us to take more control over our processes and costs.”
What is more, Nuqleus provides the Cheshire with data to say how many staff are needed, with which skills. This skills matrix enables the Cheshire to ensure that the appropriate trained resources are available to meet the peaks for each discipline as required.
“Nuqleus captures everything you do during the day, not just the workflow process,” says Steve Hilton,
“it gives us information for resource planning and restructuring. Previously we may have made changes based on perceptions, now we can build a business case around facts.”
Things that make you go “Wow!”
From a one-off three month project tool, Nuqleus is continuing to add value to the Cheshire Building Society on a day-to-day basis, improving efficiency and speed and ultimately benefiting the Society’s members.
As Steve Hilton concludes, “It’s easy to get to grips with Nuqleus, and as you start to gather data you identify trends and things that do make you go Wow! We would struggle to do without it now.”
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