Kofax Total Agility can help your organisation get things done! Part two of the Lithe IT Total Agility Series
Blog: LitheIT
Customers are almost always demanding. They expect results quickly, accurately, at a low price and with the minimum of fuss. How many businesses can look in the mirror and confidently state that they meet this demand every time?
If you manage your workload via a daily list in your notepad, or on a free app you downloaded, then your business has significant room to improve. Who can see your list and monitor your progress? Do they need to interrupt to ask what you have on and when you expect to finish? Do you have to inform managers if you have too much to do meet deadlines? Are you prioritising the correct tasks?
Solve these problems using Kofax Total Agility (KTA), with help from Lithe IT.
KTA offers a number of features which are simple to implement and will rapidly improve process efficiency within any business. I’ve covered my top 5 below.
Set deadlines and durations for each task.
Setting task deadlines is common and is helpful when prioritising work or measuring success. When tasks also have an expected duration set (the time it takes for a worker to complete the task from starting to work on it) KTA can measure if the deadlines are achievable. For instance, if I have ten tasks to complete in a day and each takes 30 minutes actual work time then all is good. If the task duration is extended to 1 hour then there is a problem. Giving KTA this data allows it to take action to re-allocate work, or inform managers of potential problems.
Configure SLA’s to provide visual cues and effect task allocation
KTA allows service levels to be implemented for all processes, and individual task activities. Measuring the SLA of an individual task allows worker efficiency to be tracked and can highlight where bottlenecks exist in the wider process.
KTA displays current SLA status for activities using symbols and colours to provide an immediate visual recognition of problem tasks. Five different colours can be used, displaying tasks which are approaching deadline using traditional RAG, and also to display tasks which have failed their SLA.
Service levels can also be used to automatically assign work to a team where that is appropriate.
The overall process SLA is what is important to the customer. KTA also allows this measure to be set and tracked in time and against budget.
Where SLA’s vary dependent on the customer, process skins provide a simple way to cope with this. See part 1 for more details.
Use escalations to allow problems to be resolved before affecting the customer SLA
With KTA there are no limits on the number of escalations that can be set. I recommend only escalating key events, as most organisations elect to escalate via email. If escalations are too frequent they are often ignored.
You can set escalations on individual tasks and for the entire process. Escalations are most powerful when there is still time for someone to fix the issue, before the SLA fails. Keep this in mind when designing an escalation approach.
With KTA there can be multiple escalations on an individual activity. This allows provides the ability to widen the visibility of the problem throughout the organisation, as the deadline gets closer.
Escalations do not need to be an email. I recommend taking more proactive steps so that the decision of the manager can be built into the process at design time. An example may be automatically re-allocating the task to a specialist team.
Build support for surge into processes where volumes can greatly vary
Many businesses, such as those in the Insurance Industry, frequently have to cope with rapid surges in process volumes. Such surges can cause logistical problems as managers scramble to re-allocate workers to help process the increase in workload. With KTA you can build in surge management into the processes.
One approach is to provide managers with the ability to immediately dial up or down the level of manual checking that occurs within affected processes. Under surge conditions, checks may be reduced to speed processing.
Another common response is to increase the size of the processing teams. With KTA, managers can loan resources from across the business, without involving IT, and automatically have them presented with surge tasks. These resources can be at a different geographic location and can be added and removed with no delay. This approach is especially powerful when all information relating to the process is held electronically.
Use Targets and Alerts to provide real-time info to managers
Finally, I recommend using KTA to monitor real time activity and targets to keep managers informed of the current operation situation.
There are no limits to the number of alerts that can be configured. For example, the system can be configured to track the number of applications received over a 15 minute window. If the number exceeds a set threshold then a process could be launched to automatically set up surge conditions. This process could dial down checks, increase the resource available to process the applications, or take any other desired measure. Finally it could send alerts informing that a surge has started.
Targets are a great way to motivate teams. KTA allows targets to be set and displayed using real-time charts within dashboards. These allow resources to see how close they are to achieving or exceeding targets. I recommend combining desired targets, with high performance targets to drive performance past what is acceptable.
KTA also allows QA to be integrated with targets to ensure that only work of the required quality counts against the targets set.
Within this post I’ve outlined some features within KTA which can be easily implemented. These will provide the visibility managers desire and provide the best support to allow organisations to meet the demands of their customers.
If you want to discuss any of this please contact me at AnthonyMurphy@LitheIT.com or visit www.litheit.com.
Lithe IT are Kofax Gold Partners and specialise in the implementation of Kofax Total Agility.
