Tony Panarese @tpanarese  Reputation - 20 Rank - Aluminum | Does any have any empiric knowledge of how to attack and ultimately eliminate a backlog of pending transactions? |
Stan Mikel @stanmikel  Reputation - 285 Rank - Aluminum | @tpnarese Hey Tony, there is a guy out of NYC who runs a consulting company you may want to check with. His profile is on Linkedin and his expertise is back office. An excerpt from his profile - An accomplished financial services business executive with broad industry and management experience and a well earned reputation of increasing profit margins through the implementation of a proven Operations Management System that will reduce back-office operations and service expense. I think he can probably help you. |
MBBinWI @MBBinWI Reputation - 1829 Rank - Silver | @tpanarese – Fundamentally, you’ve got to reduce the time to answer such that you are responding to more than you are receiving, or you need to add more capacity so that you can respond to more than you receive. The delta will give you the time to clear the backlog.
Now, how to do this has various options. You basically have a queueing situation. If you have easily identifiable “problem transactions” then creating a special unit to attack those and let the easy transactions be addressed by the common pool is one approach.
Given that this is posted in the financial services area, I’m guessing that just dumping the backlog isn’t a viable option (but has been used in other arenas) – just don’t expect to have happy customers who get dumped. |
Steve Clapp @clapper1  Reputation - 733 Rank - Copper | We frequently refer to the 8 Wastes checklist to see where those issues may be occuring within our transactional processes. “Waiting” and “overprocessing” seem to be our top causes of backlogs. Be sure to include employees within the process to do the root cause identification and the solution development. Try to include customers impacted by the backlogs, too. That way you have a better chance of identifying and fixing the real issues. |
Tony Panarese | I have a basic method for clearing backlog which I’ve been using for several years. It involves using excess capacity of the processing group to take on the backlog when they have completed their daily work load. I\\\’m reaching out to see if anyone may have come across a newer/better method. |
MBBinWI @MBBinWI Reputation - 1829 Rank - Silver | @tpanarese – Then the only other suggestion would be to lean out what needs to be processed. Is everything actually necessary? Are there redundancies that can be eliminated? Are there data entry items being typed in that can be simplified with a single stroke entry? Are there defaults that can be pre-populated that would only need to be adjusted in the rare case where they are different? etc, etc. |
February 1, 20120
