RICHMOND, Va.-The good, old-fashioned suggestion box is making a comeback at Virginia CU here as part of a process improvement program that has reduced the need for six full-time employees in one year, or the net equivalent of more than $250,000.
The $2-billion CU's "Continuous Improvement Program" (CIP) affords "the opportunity to better our efficiency ratio with the help of technology and process improvements," explained Christopher Saneda, SVP/CIO. "When we look at our expense ratio, we are higher than other organizations."
Of course, Virginia CU's suggestion box has been updated for 2009: employees submit "Continuous Improvement Requests" via e-mail or from the employee portal. A senior review team meets weekly and responds to the submitter as to the feasibility of the request, which can suggest process improvements or new technologies.
"We want this process to encourage independent thinking-no idea is considered too insignificant or too small," said Neelam Thompson, VP-strategy and governance.
Next, the team considers the requests and maps the processes in question on white boards and Microsoft Visio. "The team contacts the submitter and the supervisor and asks about the current process, how it should be changed and why the change is important."
If the software developers also think the request is feasible, they'll put it through an entire product development cycle. Total fulfillment time, from the original request to the time the submitter begins using the final product, can take from three days to three months, depending on the project type, Thompson added.
In all, 38 of 185 requests from 86 employees have been implemented since the program began in November 2008. "The requests come from all employees, from tellers to senior executives, with five or six people who seem to participate most frequently," said Thompson.
Up to three employees annually are awarded $500 each for requests that generate significant, measurable savings, and certificates are presented to everyone who participates, said Saneda.
The CIP was born of a quest for innovation, he continued. "Our CEO believes we need to work on innovation and make it part of our culture. We're approaching the concept as 'incremental innovation.' The CIP is part of the process of getting our employees involved in becoming more innovative."
Incremental innovation is paying off for Virginia CU. For example, it was able to redeploy a full-time employee to work on project management after fully automating her previous job manually uploading members' online applications for credit card balance transfers into the lending system, said Thompson.
And another manual process, initiating and processing judgments against members for non-payments on loans, was reduced from 56 manual steps to 31 under the reengineered process- saving more than .25 FTE just in the first three phases of the implementation, she said.
It's clear that Virginia CU keeps a hawk's eye on the CIP return. "Once the product is implemented, we complete a projected value-add in hard dollars or savings in labor or time," Thompson said. The team measures again after a few months to see if "we're capturing the value we intended," Saneda added.
To make a strong CIP team, IT lends its software development expertise and Saneda's executive pull, whereas the strategy and governance unit knows how to map and measure processes and has performed both back-office and front-line tasks for years.
"In today's business climate, some of these old programs, like the suggestion box, have a lot of value," Saneda said.
