The Lab Consulting

It does. Exploit standardization, specialization, and division of labor. Over a century ago, craftsmen’s work on the shop floor was treated as unique and “non-routine.” After standardization, specialization, and division of labor – the factory system – productivity increased fifty-fold. Today, the same untapped wealth hides in plain sight in knowledge work. #ProcessStandardization #ProcessMapping #Efficiency

Waste is waste. Don’t let “virtuous waste” squander hard won earnings. In a factory, tangible waste like scrap material or machine downtime is obvious. Measuring and reducing it is inarguably valuable. Beware. Knowledge work waste is intangible and harder to measure – error and data correction, rework, and customer over-service. Workers will claim that they are preserving revenue and serving customers. #KnowledgeWorkFactory #Analytics #RoboticProcessAutomation

Not true. Reject this conventional – and false – division of work. Take a closer look. Analyze knowledge work and you’ll discover that two-thirds of their work is repetitive and similar. Dig deeper. You’ll find that half of this work is avoidable. All work has valuable, repeatable patterns, but few have recognized this valuable repetition in knowledge work. #ProcessStandardization #BusinessTransformation #EfficiencyRoadmap

New case study alert: A leader in life insurance products for direct marketing channels in North America struggled to recruit and retain customer service reps for its contact-center operations. And the implications were more serious than simply long, frustrating wait times for callers. That’s because nearly half of all inbound calls involved intense efforts by CSRs to reinstate lapsed policies and avert customers from canceling existing policies. Consequently, this profitable life insurance division of a global, multi-line insurer was finding it harder to maintain its levels of in-force policies—and margins were steadily eroding. Find out how The Lab helped this insurance executive solve this urgent business problem by reading more in the case study below.....

New Client Process and Data Standardization Case Study: This global top-ten medical-device subsidiary maintains 20 facilities for operations and manufacturing. It sells & services products in over 100 countries. Product return operations included 450 employees in three global locations throughout the returns life-cycle. The project objective was to develop a broad, inarguable consensus on the existing returns processing operations including returns routing decisions, and design a standardization roadmap to improve operations.

New case study from a real life client of The Lab: "The technology vendor had promised, “You don’t need to map or improve business processes—this ERP upgrade has built-in, automated, order-to-cash processes. It also includes artificial intelligence (AI) that delivers built-in ‘lean management’ capabilities. Over time, it can learn and improve.” Management was easily persuaded. After all, their previous business process improvement and automation efforts had always fizzled. Maybe technology could succeed where their teams failed. And all of the executives’ peers were installing the ERP upgrade. So, the costly, large-scale technology upgrade implementation proceeded with virtually no review or preparation of existing business processes. Over one year after deployment of the upgrade, there was still no significant process automation. The executive team needed to realize the promise of their recently upgraded, technology-enabled, order-to-cash process to handle the increased volume from the acquisition. They were also under pressure to make the most of their investment in that ERP upgrade. Then they contacts The Lab for help..."

New Standardization Case Study from The Lab.... Over the past decade, the company had pursued performance improvement by investing relentlessly in technology, deploying a leading customer relationship management (CRM) system, upgrading its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, and acquiring a host of ancillary applications: best-of-breed accounts payable (A/P) and accounts receivable (A/R), a new general ledger (G/L), a new workforce-management application, and several more. Each new technology arrived as a disruptive, costly, “big bang” event promising breakthrough results. In practice, the promised paybacks never materialized, and each technology created as many issues as it claimed to resolve. The COO felt that standardization could help “de-layer” and simplify these interconnections so that automation (APIs, RPA, AI/ML, and workflow) could perform these tasks. She also wanted an improvement approach that was the opposite of the previous “big bang” disruptions: it had to be consistent and build in cumulative operational capabilities that could survive employee turnover. Learn more inside....

We routinely automate the "un-automatable" for our Credit Union and Banking clients who are struggling with turnover and process resiliency. Check out how we automated Automobile Loan Lien Releases for this client in the video below. We routinely use Intelligent Automation (MS Power Automate) to automate FIS, Jack Henry, Fiserv, Corelation systems for FIs. Found out more details on how to engage us to accelerate your automation roadmap on our website: www.thelabconsulting.com

A regional leader in personal lines property and casualty (P&C) insurance consistently led its peer group in policyholder experience and service performance. However, both its expense and loss ratios were routinely higher than competitors’ and stubbornly resisted management’s persistent improvement efforts. Technology implementations alone weren’t delivering the promised cost or productivity benefits. Management was seeking a new strategic process-improvement partner—one that would deliver benefits and further prepare their organization for deep automation. They contacted The Lab...find out why in the case study below.....

Since 1993, The Lab has helped business leaders improve organizations with a process-first and standardization-centric approach. Today, we combine our patented Knowledge Work Standardization® platform with the latest digital tech—automation, AI, and data analytics—to deliver strategic transformation benefits for our clients.