Restructuring Business Processes to Increase Operational Efficiency

The Brief

In 2018, a private equity firm acquired a national wealth advisory firm, along with most of the firm’s senior leadership team. The firm’s leadership team needed to align and grow the back-office services that were at the core of their business offerings. The firm had set clear targets for operational growth and was looking to scale some highly specialized operations services. The issue was that there was little evidence to indicate that their operational processes could sustain and support their projected growth.

The Challenge

Apexon’s Strategy and Innovation team was brought in to provide an accurate representation of the day-to-day operations. The end goal was to create easily replicable, highly scalable, and risk-free processes in order to facilitate and aid the client’s growth objectives. The first step was to map and analyze the client’s major operational processes.

Initially, Apexon’s expert consultants were able to clearly demonstrate and quantify multiple areas of operational inefficiencies. Apexon’s team also identified that individuals, with highly specialized company knowledge, were increasingly expected to execute enormously complex tasks, with little guidance and best practices poorly defined. Few of the client’s employees truly owned business tasks, let alone processes, from start to finish, and many employees were spending a large amount of time on tedious and redundant work.

The Solution

As the client’s operations were hemorrhaging valuable capital, Apexon’s team needed to reorganize the client’s operation processes into a hierarchical structure. In order to do so, the client’s overarching departmental goals, and how they were tied to those of the company, needed to be defined.

First, Apexon’s expert consultants interviewed departmental leaders and subject matter experts, during which time they were able to identify key employees who had the highest degree of familiarity with vital processes and how they were executed. After hosting extensive interviews, Apexon was able to create a multitude of process maps and summarized the areas within the company that should be prioritized. The majority of the client’s operational inefficiencies were the result of improper process flows to the incorrect business stakeholder.

In several cases, redundancy was identified and mitigated, which allowed employees to focus on strategic and high-value tasks. Afterwards, the larger and time-consuming processes were reduced in number by more than 50%, while lower levels of “sub-process” and “task” labels were utilized to capture the remainder making future assessments much simpler.

The Results

The final solution provided the client with clear documentation of the current business functions and a tangible roadmap with actionable recommendations. A tool kit was also provided to rapidly onboarding for new employees, which reduced labor dependencies by 80%. Finally, Apexon created a customized development resource for the client, so that optimization projects could be accurately targeted in the future.

By the end of the quarter, the clients executive leadership team effectively restructured 30% of their major business processes and increased operational efficiency by more than 300%.

More importantly, the client’s securities trading was positioned to increase by almost 200% over the course of the next 2 years, and vendor cost is projected to be reduced up to 20%.

*Strategic Roadmap is an in-depth visual analysis that uncovers organizational issues which can impede process efficiency and execution. Apexon utilizes industry standard methodologies meant to create actionable frameworks for all business needs. It provides valuable insight where personal institutional knowledge may have been the only previous means of recourse.