Efficiency is an easy concept to grasp, but it is often difficult to achieve. It’s often even more difficult to quantify the costs of not being efficient for your credit union.
Think about it.
The simple reality is that small inefficiencies can creep into the way we do things on a day-to-day basis without us even realizing it. And over time the impacts can be significant.
Watch this brief video for an illustration of how costly inefficiency can be.
ACTION ADVICE: Share this information with your team and engage them in an effort to identify inefficiencies that can be eliminated to reduce costs. Chances are that there are some simple process changes that can yield very high pay-offs in a relatively short period of time. The ability to realocate the time, money, and effort that is being lost in these areas can be a significant opportunity for improving the overall performance of your credit union.
It’s Your Turn: Share your examples…where do inefficiencies creep into the day-to-day processes in your credit union? What have you done to address them? How significant would the cost savings be if you worked to eliminate at least one inefficiency per month for the next year? Please share your thoughts by posting a comment.
Great video! I could not agree more about how impactful simple process changes can be. Especially over a long period of time.
One perfect example of inefficiencies in daily credit union life is staffing teller lines based on educated guesses as opposed to actual historic teller transaction volumes per branch. With labor costs being the most expensive cost in retail operations, this inefficiency is substantial. A great solution to schedule your teller line based on actual teller transaction volumes, is the Teller Management System. Learn more at http://www.fmis.com.
Thank You Chadd! I appreciate the positive feedback and am glad you found the video useful. Thanks also for sharing the resource for credit unions…it is in the little things that we repeat that we create the most impact and it sounds like your solution may help in that regard.
I like his perspective on profitability. Making incremental changes can lead to a huge impact on growth. Service representatives on the platform side can certainly benefit by having a better sense of where and how their time is spent. I’m sure there’s more than ten minutes a day that can be put to more productive uses.
There’s actually a solution that tracks the time a MSR spends on each product and service with a member called the Lobby Tracking System. It compiles the data into reports that will allow you to “efficiently” evaluate trends of an MSR or branch to determine if they are spending too much time (not being efficient in delivery) or too little (which can result in problems down the road that will take more time to correct). It certainly will identify where those incremental changes can be made. There’s more details on that solution at http://www.fmsi.com.
Thanks for sharing your insights and the resource Kevin.
I concur with you that there is likely more than 10 minutes a day available in everyone’s lives if we make the choice to find that time and reallocate it. There is often some push back on this when you talk with people, but if they track their time and review it, they often find 10, 20, and even 30 minutes that are lost to minor things each day that could be used more effectively. The key is using systems to make routine things take less time so that time is freed up for other things that get pushed out.