CASE STUDIES
62%
Reduction of WIP case loads
66%
Less complaints
14%
Increase in productivity
30%
Shorter case instruction to completion time
Equilaw work with home-owners and financial advisors to help people unlock the equity in their home. Recognised for their niche work and experience in equity release law, they are one of the market leaders in this sector.
A team of 150 work with over 500 independent advisers providing services from trusted brands including Aviva, Liverpool Victoria, JUST, Legal & General, Canada Life, Julian Hodges Bank, Pure Retirement, More2Life and many more.
Following an investment from private equity, Equilaw’s client base expanded to include more competitively priced, high-volume contracts. This created pressure on their case handlers to increase productivity in order to maintain profit margins.
Equilaw’s existing management information systems weren’t up to task. Their monthly reports and spreadsheets only showed high level data and basic metrics which weren’t enough to monitor performance at a team or product level, let alone drive the kind of productivity that they needed to thrive.
They were limited to a number of on-premises systems with data stored in silos and collated manually on a monthly basis by finance teams. This slowed down the process of change and monitoring productivity improvements
The biggest problem was that you couldn’t see what the hell was going on in the business…It was like driving a car with your eyes closed.
Max Hayden, Managing Director Equilaw
Equilaw’s management system was not current or in-depth enough to provide an accurate portrait of where the business was at, or how well the teams were performing in real time. They needed to pinpoint the status of their cases, be able to spot trends and evaluate the type and mix of work coming through.
Their industry knowledge gave us comfort that they understood our data and how to use it for management information. They took time to meet all stakeholders, ensuring buy-in to the project.
Reddish Green worked with Equilaw to assess their current data inputs and identify what was needed to support their business objectives moving forward. They had to locate sources of high-quality data and determine where and why the knowledge gaps were occurring.
To support Equilaw’s Project 300 plan to transform their operational performance, Reddish Green created a series of dashboards that show performance and case analytics in real time and at a granular level.
Equilaw needed guidance to transition from their on-premises data management system to a cloud-based storage ‘warehouse’. Many companies fear that their data security and privacy will be compromised in a cloud-based system. But our experience is that data security has been enhanced.
The individual, team and company-wide dashboards were based on Microsoft Power BI technology and are accessed via the Reddish Green app built on a react platform. Equilaw use the dashboards to manage the mix of work within the teams, ensuring they have the right people in the right teams, at the right time. The dynamic dashboards are projected onto TV screens so that performance levels are displayed on a live leader board.
Reddish Green explained that the Microsoft cloud is often safer than on-premises data storage. Thanks to Identity Access Management (IAM) methods linked to users and explicit IP address restrictions, Equilaw can strictly control access to their cloud-based data.
In terms of operational benefits, being in the cloud connects a business to the Application Programming Interface (API) economy. APIs connect computers and software. They securely allow all the various systems to link up and ‘talk to each other’ making data collection and analysis more efficient. Being in the cloud opens a world of possibilities for Equilaw where they can access their dashboards safely both in and out of the office and gain entry to services like Azure AI and the big data platform.
People often ask about return on investment. The simple answer is that our current levels of profitability would not be possible without the use of performance analytics. It’s that binary for me.
Team leaders now manage their teams with more confidence and with much better results because they’re working to detailed KPI’s and receiving immediate feedback.
They no longer have to wait until the end of the month to get an estimate of how they are doing. The business can not only manage volume performance, but they can now also measure and control quality performance as well.
Equilaw has been able to improve performance and customer satisfaction and their profits are now trending upwards thanks to the positive impact of Reddish Green’s interventions.
The teams have been able to identify several bottlenecks and design new solutions to improve the flow of cases.
Thanks to the transparency of the interactive dashboards, Equilaw can now have more collaborative and productive conversations with their partners, where they can identify the reason for delays in turnaround.
Equilaw’s entire annual budget has been built on the data sets that are now available to them. For the year ahead, they can predict sales, turnaround, income, expenditure, and forecast profit margins. This means they can set achievable targets which grow the business and boost morale.
In addition to the ongoing support & maintenance, Reddish Green is now working with Equilaw on a series of customer dashboards.
This has been transformational because it’s allowed us to change not just the performance of the business but the culture of the business. Reddish Green work harder to understand your business and the commercial objectives before they come up with a solution. They are obsessively focussed on delivering a business benefit from performance analytics.
- A reduction of 62% of WIP case loads
- Complaints cut by two thirds
- Improved quality of service A 14% increase in productivity Improves daily completions
- Increased profit margins
- Time from instruction to completion is reduced by 30%
- Technology leadership & strategy
- Deep dive data & technology discovery & recommendations
- Design of processes and data model to support business operations and reporting of KPI’s
- Decommissioning old systems, migrating data and integrations where required
- Training and on-going adoption support to transition to cloud-based operations
