Peter Falk has been a systems engineer in varying capacities with Wells Fargo since 1997. Falk has acted as the project manager and technical lead on several large outsourcing projects and on large and small-scale application upgrades. He currently manages a team of engineers who supports the document management group as well as other assorted applications in use at Wells Fargo’s Employee Service Center in Phoenix.
Wells Fargo is a diversified financial services company encompassing a collection of acquired financial institutions. It has 23 million customers served in more than 6000 locations by 150,000 employees. The HR Service Center hires more than 3000 employees a month and processes 40,000 documents in transit at any given time. This was the main driver for the BPM project.
In 1997 the documents were scanned and stored. In 1999, the Service Center went to an online archive for all documents. In 2000, it was decided to move to BPM and move away from the paper-based system. The full upgrade to BPM architecture was started in 2004.
The drivers for the effort were government compliance, internal business requirements and reduction of operating costs. Federal new-hire regulations are specific. Document retention and destruction are very important and if done wrong can cause liability problems. And, of course, there are the ongoing regulations in HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. The last two laws caused major changed in how Wells Fargo handled its in-house auditing work requiring ongoing verification and review. All the separate Wells Fargo businesses have different documentation and compliance needs.
Reducing operation costs was another driver. Specifically, Wells Fargo needed to reduce the administrative time burden on revenue-generating employees and also reduce the FTE required to case-manage the new-hire process while integrating as much as possible. Falk pointed out that not a single FTE was lost from this project. Employees simply became much more efficient and valuable by almost doubling the amount of work done.
Wells Fargo handles 180,000 performance reviews for employees each year. This takes nine months to do and all the material comes in cardboard boxes from Fed Ex. The new automated system is "limited touch", so that if there are no problems with the data, the process does not need oversight. It was found that most of the errors were generated by one part of the hiring process, so a feedback loop to coach the line management helped eliminate most of the errors. This saved a lot of time and focused on the exact spot where the problems occurred, so they could be addressed and fixed.
The hardware has been vastly improved too. Previously the Service Center had to reboot often but the new .Net system has not needed to be touched. In addition, the new magnetic storage system, (MSS) has vastly increased performance by enabling almost instant retrieval of documents. A new scan client has improved scan quality.
Falk said that system integration is the holy grail of BPM. Wells Fargo has dozens of HR systems, none of them presently connected. Through web service integration, documents such as W2s, time cards, or any other document an employee needs can be delivered where and when needed and is seamlessly tied to the specific business applications. Falk said it is important to remember when you move from a paper to an electronic process, the process should NOT mirror the existing paper process. By re-thinking the process, the workflow can be greatly improved over the previous paper flow.
The lessons learned included:
The improvements have been dramatic. Before, the turn-around time was 1-2 months using a full-time manager and an army of temps who were very expensive. ECM reduced the turn-around time to 6-7 days. After the BPM project with magnetic storage was implemented the turn-around time dropped to 1-2 days and it only takes 20-30 minutes to execute. The new-hire process is 100% compliant with excellent audit support and the document quality is greatly improved because most problems are caught at scan time while the batch is still at hand.
Peter Falk recently spoke on this topic at a recent BrainStorm's Business Process Management Conference. For more information on this conference, visit www.BPMConference.com
Jon Huntress
Special Events Correspondent
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