Business Impacts of Visio

A picture is worth a thousand words. So is a flowchart. I realized the importance of flowcharts when I started working in UAE based Bank ABC. During the orientation and initial training, I was handed a 250-page folder containing Bank's policies, processes and guidelines for various tasks. Opening a new checking account, for example, was explained in details in several lengthy paragraphs. I was already lost after the 3rd paragraph since many of the steps were cross-referenced and were interconnected. Many of my fellow new-hires voiced the same problem. This also reflected in our job functions. Many of them were not following proper procedures when opening new accounts, home and auto financing, Letters of Credit, loans, etc. Some of these errors were minors whereas others caused major delays in completing customer applications. Department managers had to spend a lot of time revising and checking junior employees’ work for errors. Many of our clients were frustrated and the Bank was losing their confidence and their business.

A wake up call came when the auditors discovered some of these inefficiencies and certain employees’ non-compliance to Bank's policies and recommended procedures. A hefty fine of $75,000 was imposed on the Bank. To rectify the problem, our senior management decided to revise departments’ procedures and required all employees to go through quarterly trainings to get better familiarized with performing their job functions properly. This posed another problem that employees were spending significant time in trainings and started lagging in doing their daily jobs.

Since I had already shared my feedback after the first orientation and came up with a number of suggestions for training material, my manager commissioned me the task to conduct the training for my department. After doing some research for various options, I came across MS Visio. I found it an excellent tool for designing and documenting complex processes in an easy to read and understandable pictorial form. It comes with a wide selection of templates for various types of flowcharts that can be used for any department. It shares a common interface with the other applications in the MS Office Suite, and therefore much less of a learning curve is required to start using it. Dynamic data from other applications (i.e. Excel, Word, etc.) can be easily inserted into Visio diagrams to keep the flowcharts up to date with real time information. It has a very user friendly interface and offers a WYSIWYG environment to create diagrams and charts. It cost about $500 per license for MS Visio Professional and we bought 2 licenses.

I translated lengthy paragraphs into simple diagrams using some of the Bank’s custom images that the employees were already familiar with. I broke down complex processes into smaller, easy to understand and department specific flowcharts. After the trainings were conducted using Visio flowcharts, almost all of the employees reported a much better understanding of their job functions. They all printed flowcharts for their departments and kept them handy for quick reference. . I developed a flow chart for my department for opening the Letter of Credit (L/C) that I have attached for reference at the bottom.

After the quarterly performance review, not a single complaint was filed related to new accounts. There were no more errors and flaws in the procedures and the Bank regained customers confidence. This improved the overall process for each department and managers could now focus more on their jobs than micromanaging the junior staff. The end result was that my department alone reported an increased quarterly profit for $28,000 and an A+ rating after our next audit.