Question 17

Case Study 2: ClearFlow Financial Services – Loan Approval Process

ClearFlow Financial Services (CFS) is a mid-sized bank specializing in personal and business loans. Over the past year, CFS has faced complaints about delayed loan approvals, leading to customer dissatisfaction and a loss of business to competitors.

The current loan approval process involves multiple manual steps:

1. Customers submit loan applications via email or in person.

2. The applications are reviewed manually by a customer service representative for completeness.

3. Approved applications are forwarded to a loan officer for financial assessment.

4. If further clarification is needed, the customer service representative contacts the customer via phone or email.

5. The final approval is done by the loan officer, after which the customer is notified of the decision.

Pain Points Identified:

• Manual errors in application review and data entry.

• Long wait times for customers due to bottlenecks in the customer service representative steps of the process.

• Lack of visibility into the process for management and customers.

To address these challenges, CFS plans to introduce a Business Process Management solution to streamline and automate the loan approval process.

The project sponsor expects the business analyst to mobilize the project, create process models to analyze the current state, identify inefficiencies, and design an optimized "to-be" process. The success of the project is defined by the reduction of an average wait time for a single application and is committed to in the business case for the project.

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Question:

During analysis, the step 4 of the current process is identified to be causing the most amount of delays. As a business analyst, you are trying to identify the root causes of such delays. Which technique would BEST help identify the root causes?