Improving Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty at Midland States Bank

Contributed by: Carl Fricke | Director, Enterprise Operational Excellence, Midland States Bank

At our bank, Operational Excellence is one of five strategic initiatives. The tone from the C-Suite is loud and clear on the importance of embedding Operational Excellence into the organization. To facilitate this, I was appointed as Director, Enterprise Operational Excellence, reporting directly to the CEO. My primary task is to establish and implement an OpEx framework across the enterprise and embed the concept to a point where it is a daily practice and not a one-time project. Since April of last year, I have personally facilitated six OpEx initiatives at the enterprise level with the focus of improving the end-to-end processes from the customer’s perspective, all of which have had positive results and set the stage for continued improvements.

Two of these large initiatives were focused on improving the end-to-end processing in commercial and consumer lending. Establishing our OpEx framework, which leverages the best practices from Lean Six Sigma, we gathered key operators and SMEs from each of the seven functional areas the processes cross. As a group, we created the as-is process and mapped it into a value stream map. This was the first time we had a visual representation of a true end-to-end process. We then identified efficiency opportunities ranging from unnecessary transposing and training gaps to non-value add steps and automation opportunities. Next, we plotted each improvement opportunity based on value and level of effort. The future state end-to-end process was then mapped out and implemented.