In the early days at Alleon Group we worked with a client to review their internally managed scanning and imaging of their inbound mail. The department was expensive, heavily staffed, and only fully utilized a portion of each day. After an assessment, Alleon Group made the recommendation to outsource the work and close the internal operation. The solution included fully electronic servicing, a cost reduction of nearly 70%, and full integration into the downstream business platforms.
The challenge came during implementation planning as many of the current processes were not well-documented. As we were planning, each day a staff member would inevitably announce, “Oh, yeah! Forgot about this other thing we also do …” Turns out many of those “other things” were mission critical. This went on every day for weeks, creating a potential delay in the anticipated transition schedule.
We approached the CFO and project sponsor with the dilemma. I believed we were about 70% ready, meaning 30% of the business requirements were not fully identified or solutioned. To get to 90% (our normal threshold) could take up to two years.
The CFO suggested we had two ways to look at this – we could keep plowing through the two years, which will likely evolve into something more since business requirements will change over time, or we can just implement and bring a big broom to sweep up the mess during the early weeks of the new solution. Wow! Did he just suggest implementing and sweeping up the mess?
Well, that’s exactly what we did. Surprisingly the first few weeks were not as rocky as we thought. The client went in with eyes wide open. They staffed up their transition team. The newly selected external partner was apprised of the situation. And, Alleon Group was there every step of the way.
In a post implementation review, the CFO admitted to being nervous, but fully believed we could weather the storm and that the potential risk was acceptable. The upside of implementing sooner rather than later was significant, both financially and operationally. He then said if he had it to do over again, he would do the exact same thing.
