Operational Efficiency Overview
Our clients are continually faced with pressures to keep current with industry trends, lower costs and implement best practices while maintaining existing service levels within operations. As a result, Beacon has worked with many global investment managers and industry service providers to develop an operations and technology environment to best support their products and services. This includes operating model development, business process redesign, global integration support, and technology implementation. We work with our clients to develop a custom roadmap to assist them in meeting their goals and objectives. Listed below are the key elements of an operations efficiency effort.

Current State Review
The first component of work is gaining a thorough understanding of the current state work environment. This phase helps to further define the scope of the project including areas of focus, key stakeholders, goals and objectives, and dependencies. Previous work and documented materials are leveraged, wherever possible, to perform the current state data collection. Interviews and observations are also conducted with key staff and business owners to review current service levels and business requirements. We identify key volumes, statistics and business drivers which serve as the foundation to measuring the impact of recommendations and potential changes. In addition, technology reviews are conducted through an application assessment that identifies system dependencies, functional gaps, processing gaps and risk areas. Current process maps, technology workflows, and custom client services are documented for this phase of the project.

Operations Analysis & Design
Beacon consolidates the current state processes and metrics to develop an activity based measurement of the current state environment. Beacon identifies commonalities/redundancies between groups, analyzes workload balance, quantifies manual and automated tasks, and reviews detailed workflows. Preliminary opportunities are developed to meet the client's objectives, achieve efficiencies, optimize technology, and deploy best practices. Beacon identifies the true operational drivers from the analysis and measures the impact of potential changes for both operations and technology.

Strategic Development
Beacon utilizes the operations analysis to further develop formal recommendations and requirements. This includes the development of business workflows and technology architecture. Beacon documents business requirements including interim and target workflows for each process to drive technology decisions and development. Each process is mapped out for multiple scenarios and documented for validation with business personnel. Functional requirements and integration needs are also included in the business requirements. Beacon then works with technology to measure the development effort and/or cost to meet the business requirements. Preliminary action plans are also created to support the implementation process.

Implementation
This phase includes the implementation efforts to support both operations and technology change. Beacon develops detailed roadmaps to achieve the target environment. This includes project management, communication, process documentation, implementation plans, and organizational impacts. This also includes support for a system needs assessment, software selection, and proof of concept highlighted in Beacon's Systems Strategy and Implementation services. Beacon provides support through the full implementation process as well as on-going post implementation efforts.

Post Execution
Beacon will often support post execution efforts including impact analysis, organizational changes, and strategic planning. Post execution support is primarily client by client and is typically dependent on the original project scope.

Click here for more information about Beacon's project experience and service offerings.