Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks in the Payment Solutions Referral Process OPS/571 April 5, 2010 Week one observation of the Payment Solutions referral process identified many steps to managing referrals. The metric used to measure this process is the number of referrals per day. These metric changes daily and because of the volume of referrals must be managed most efficiently. A good process can still be improved as bottlenecks appear will cause a change in the process or delay productivity. Recognizing the bottleneck in the process and planning what to do next to ensure the process does not stop is important. A bottleneck is one that constrains or obstructs the production process, which would slow production and profit. One bottleneck in the Payment Solution referral process is with the “Can I solve quickly'” question, if the answer is no then one must put the referral to the side and follow up in 48 hours. If the answer to that question is yes, then the process continues. The bottleneck early on is when the answer is no. The second bottleneck in the referral process is when a product or service needs approval from the relationship manager. The relationship manager generally spends about 75% of his or her time on the road and not near their computer. A risk form for a client may need to be signed off on to complete the process of a product or service. Without this signature of the relationship manager, the process is stopped for that particular referral. The ideal situation is to start a referral process for a product and to complete the process within the same day. Bottlenecks get in the way of this process and require the Payment Solutions referral process to be continually improved. Improvement of the referral process for Payment Solutions would be that most of the referrals that one would receive through email or voicemail would be quality and the client would be ready to discuss to move forward with the next step in the process, discussion would occur and documents would be signed. Once the documents are signed, the relationship manager would be available to sign off on documents and a request would be submitted for the client to be contacted by our implementation team to setup the service or schedule product training. The process described is without bottlenecks, which rarely occurs.