CASE STUDY - Enhanced Visibility and Superior Customer Service at Iron Mountain
Commentary by Paul Tsitsopoulos, Director–Operations Engineering, and Steve Weber, Manager–Operations Engineering, Iron Mountain
Company Overview
Iron Mountain Incorporated 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 U.S., 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 Mountainwanted to ensure that tasks werenot transitioned from group to groupwith incomplete or erroneous data, andthat assignments that could be handledsimultaneously were executed in parallel.Furthermore, the organization wanted toenhance its up-front customer data entryand data management capabilities.
To help achieve these objectives, andcreate an environment more amenable to superior customer service, Iron Mountainengaged Collaborative Consulting.
Solution
A team of Collaborative business processmanagement and technology expertsexamined Iron Mountain’s existingcustomer on-boarding processes andidentified areas where tasks previouslyperformed in a linear fashion couldbe done simultaneously. However, tocompress the period usually requiredfor on-boarding, Iron Mountain neededaccess to information in real time. Thatmeant it had to change the way it enteredand managed new customer data.
To accommodate these requirements,Collaborative worked with Iron Mountainbusiness and technology professionals todevelop a Web application to manage up-front data entry more smoothly. Inaddition, the team implemented a workflowmanagement system to more efficientlyadd new customers’ digital assets to IronMountain’s technology infrastructure.The team also established a repository tohold new customer information.
Like many companies that successfullyimplement BPM projects, Iron Mountain hasappreciably improved visibility into executingprocesses, as well as enhanced reporting ofcurrent and historical process information.
Benefits
As a result of its BPM solution, IronMountain is able to bring its customerson board much faster than before. Inaddition, employees who used to managetime-consuming on-boarding tasks are freed up to work on other projects. Thisability has enhanced revenue collectionand customer satisfaction while reducingoperating costs.
And because the team automateda host of processes that had previouslybeen performed manually, notably datavalidation and batch loading of data, IronMountain customers enjoy a more consistentexperience. Supporting processesthat are still done manually are morestreamlined and consistent throughoutthe organization. Moreover, like manycompanies that successfully implementBPM projects, Iron Mountain has appreciablyimproved visibility into executingprocesses, as well as enhanced reportingof current and historical processinformation. As a result, Iron Mountainmanagers can spot bottlenecks as soon asthey occur, and sometimes even beforethey occur, eliminating many problemsand improving manageability.
The solution also facilitates continuousimprovement. In the future, IronMountain will benefit from enhanceddevelopment productivity resulting fromthe BPM architecture Collaborative created.This framework will enable theorganization to automate as much as 70percent of the manual tasks remaining inits business process. Iron Mountain willalso be able to use the data it collects overthe next several months to establish actualperformance metrics for various tasks. Assuch, it will be able to create service-levelagreements, measure them precisely, andact quickly when they are missed. In summary,Iron Mountain is able to provideexceptional service to its customers—particularlynew customers—that will onlyincrease as additional BPM tools andtechniques are employed.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .