2 Should the process be redesigned, and if so, which option should be adopted? Andy Curtis, the Mortgage Operations Manager for North West Constructive Bank (NWCB), had launched a major investigation into his processes and how they might be redesigned (see Part 1 of this case study in Chapter 4).

He had been prompted by the failure of his operation to improve after it had consolidated three separate sites into one location. The staff from the three old centres that covered the northern, southern and western areas of the bank’s customer base had been kept largely intact in the new site. Andy and his team suspected that this may have contributed to their failure to improve performance, especially throughput time performance, immediately after the move.

Andy has initiated an investigation that would provide the basic data for a thorough examination of how the mortgage centre’s processes could be redesigned. The results of this investigation are shown in Figure 5.17 and Table 5.4. These detail the activities contained within each stage of the overall process together with each activity’s immediate predecessor, the type of skills necessary to carry out each activity, the allowed time for each activity (this had varied slightly between the three regional offices, so an average had been taken), and an estimate of the minimum and maximum times necessary to perform each activity.