Organizational Excellence team pilots new Business Process Improvement service

Over the winter, the Operational Excellence (OE) team piloted the new Business Process Improvement (BPI) service. Chris Farmer and Joe Lott developed and refined repeatable processes, created a BPI toolkit, and practiced elicitation, documentation, and analysis of current processes. The methodology used consists of understanding the organizational context for the process, defining and analyzing current state, identifying opportunities for improvement, developing future state with improved processes, and creating measures as well as an action plan for implementation of the future state.

Working with Gifts Administration, the OE team employed this methodology for three of Gift Administration’s existing business processes. Those processes were the new gift setup process; the reconciliation of the workday Gift Module to the General Ledger; and the calculation and distribution of quarterly prorated endowment spending attributable to current year endowment contributions.

Karen Harris explains, “Using this methodology provided the following benefits to our team. We were able to map and document the end to end processes, highlighting both manual and automated steps, identify pain points, and develop opportunities for process improvements. Documenting the process was of particular importance for one of our processes, as it was known to only one staff member, who will be retiring next month. The BPI project also provided our department an opportunity to cross train employees, since all participated in the mapping of the business process. And best of all, we were provided a roadmap for us to follow in our efforts to implement improvements!”

The BPI team gained knowledge and experience in business process improvement methodology. During the project, the team identified lessons learned for process improvements on their next endeavor while at the same time, assisted Gift Administration to document, streamline, and improve three of their critical functions.