Iron Mountain
End-to-End Business Process Management Enabling Enhanced Visibility, Continuous Improvement and Superior Customer Service
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Company Overview
Iron Mountain Incorporated (www.ironmountain.com) is the global leader in information protection and storage services. The company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions to more than 90,000 corporate clients throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
Business Challenge
As a by-product of numerous years of consistent, profitable growth, Iron Mountain recently discovered several opportunities to improve the efficiency of its “customer on-boarding” processes. The information storage leader needed to bring new customers into its technology infrastructure in a more streamlined manner. Specifically, it wanted to reduce the number of groups involved in on-boarding, optimize the process and improve coordination among participants.
As part of its new process, Iron Mountain wanted to ensure that tasks were not transitioned from group to group with incomplete or erroneous data, and that assignments that could be handled simultaneously were executed in parallel. Furthermore, the organization wanted to enhance its up-front customer data entry and data management capabilities.
To help achieve these objectives, and create an environment more amenable to superior customer service, Iron Mountain engaged Collaborative Consulting.
Solution
A team of Collaborative business process management and technology experts examined Iron Mountain’s existing customer on-boarding processes, and identified areas where tasks previously performed in a linear fashion could be done simultaneously. However, to compress the period usually required for on-boarding, Iron Mountain needed access to information in real time. That meant it had to change the way it entered and managed new customer data.
To accommodate these requirements, Collaborative worked with Iron Mountain business and technology professionals to develop a Web application to manage up-front data entry more smoothly. In addition, the team implemented a workflow management system to more efficiently add new customers’ digital assets to Iron Mountain’s technology infrastructure. The team also established a repository to hold new customer information.
Benefits
As a result of its BPM solution, Iron Mountain is able to bring its customers on board much faster than before. In addition, employees who used to manage time-consuming on-boarding tasks are freed up to work on other projects. This ability has enhanced revenue collection and customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs.
And, because the team automated a host of processes that had previously been performed manually, notably data validation and batch loading of data, Iron Mountain customers enjoy a more consistent experience. Supporting processes that are still done manually are more streamlined, and consistent throughout the organization. Moreover, like many companies that successfully implement BPM projects, Iron Mountain has appreciably better visibility into executing processes, plus enhanced reporting of current and historical process information. As a result, Iron Mountain managers can spot bottlenecks as soon as they occur, and sometimes even before they occur, eliminating many problems and improving manageability.
The solution also facilitates continuous improvement. In the future, Iron Mountain will benefit from enhanced development productivity resulting from the BPM architecture Collaborative created. This framework will enable the organization to automate as much as 70 percent of the manual tasks remaining in its business process. Iron Mountain will also be able to use the data it collects over the next several months to establish actual performance metrics for various tasks. As such, it will be able to create service level agreements, measure them precisely, and act quickly when they are missed. In summary, Iron Mountain is able to provide exceptional service to its customers—particularly new customers—that will only increase as additional BPM tools and techniques are employed.