Digital Data Workflow Solution to Streamline Operations
Background
A privately-held, multi-faceted investment firm sought help in creating a centralized data hub to securely capture and share key business information throughout a network of internal users. The firm is comprised of several departments that coordinate and manage the personal, professional, and financial affairs of its 150+ members. The firm’s existing method of capturing information was to record data across disparate file types in various locations, which created lengthy response times, made their data less reportable, and did not follow any standard process or workflow.
Case management, eligibility tracking, and inter-departmental communication are critical mission drivers for the organization. The firm’s old form of record-keeping and its decentralized database made it very challenging for employees to efficiently provide the necessary services to family members and other entities and to standardize and disseminate up-to-date information.
Our Role
The investment firm called on Ignyte to create a centralized data platform to replace its old disparate spreadsheets and other outdated forms of record-keeping. Ignyte worked closely with the firm’s key stakeholders and user groups to gain a better understanding of their operational goals and pain points, as well as create strategies to optimize the services provided to their members. Our team led the the planning, analysis, and implementation of a solution to manage family member data and the growing volume of family member requests and services provided by the enterprise. The solution enables members of the organization to standardize work and services provided through reusable workflow templates and tools, generate ad-hoc shareable reports, view dashboards with at-a-glance data illustrating status and utilization, and manage advisors to the enterprise, among other capabilities.
After careful review of the firm’s existing processes and workflows, Ignyte streamlined the firm’s service delivery by designing and implementing digital workflows to automate manual tasks and improve the reliability of data. By doing so, Ignyte was able to reduce processing times from hours to seconds, improving the responsiveness and effectiveness of the firm’s internal operations. Users can now quickly log conversations, tag by topic for improved searchability, and choose who they want to share the information with using the solution’s role-based access controls. Ignyte also established request templates designed to further accelerate processing times to drive more value for the client. Our team’s end-to-end support included extensive user testing to confirm that the new solution met all user needs, training for all users on how to use the new system, and organizational change management support to assist with the rollout of the improved workflows.
The new system was designed with flexibility and scalability in mind to adapt to the evolving needs of the firm. Each successful release of the solution garnered excitement from new departments within the firm, and it encouraged new users within the firm to adopt the solution. As a result, the organization has continued to realize significant time-savings for activities previously completed through very manual means. Automated workflow activities, built-in eligibility pooling, and streamlined communication repositories have driven faster decision-making and planning capabilities for the organization, as well as improved transparency and oversight for the organization’s leaders. Additionally, through the centralized hub of data, members of the organization can build faster connections and relationships between various entities to further the mission and initiatives of the enterprise.
Key Accomplishments & Impact
The following are the key accomplishments and impact of our team’s solution and delivery:
- Enabled robust search and comparison capabilities across people, engagements, events, and beyond, that were previously not possible to perform across outdated spreadsheets
- Automated report generation, reducing creation time from several hours to under 5 minutes
- Replaced tens of spreadsheets and other trackers like shared OneNote documents that were previously used for tracking information with a central platform that automatically builds and visualizes data connections
- Provided reporting and workflow customization features that enable different users to measure utilization and benchmarks according to their roles and responsibilities
- Built dashboards providing insights into fulfillment times, common request types, and other impactful metrics
- Provided a central location for tracking critical conversations that impact resource allocation and planning across the enterprise
- Facilitated secure information sharing between subsets of users and departments
- Established a formal audit tracking mechanism by which members of the organization can view when information was last updated and by whom
- Connected previously siloed departments through robust workflow collaboration tools to enable faster request fulfillment and organizational goal achievement
- Reduced risks of conflict through real-time communication and updates within and between departments
