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The Student Loans Company (SLC) is a non-departmental public body company in the United Kingdom that provides student loans.
The organisation is owned and funded by the UK government and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
SLC is responsible for providing loans to students – both UK and Overseas – and collecting loan repayments alongside HM Revenue and Customs.
With four offices across Glasgow (Clyde Place and Hillington), Darlington, and Llandudno, the organisation has over 3,300 employees, 8 million customers, and a loan book of over £135bn.
In 2015, we engaged with the SLC team to discuss an OPX Pilot solution to cover several of their operational areas.
Before working with OPX, SLC’s back-office systems lacked intelligent work routing and operational reporting capabilities.
Key issues included:
The Workflow Management team managed much of the organisation’s operational activities through manual spreadsheets and other end-user-developed applications, such as basic databases and worksheets.
Work was centrally managed and distributed via spreadsheets to allocate work items to Team Managers, typically on a daily basis.
The result of this style of management was:
It also inhibited the teams’ ability to respond to peaks and troughs in demand when required.
End-to-end customer experience was also negatively impacted. Customer touchpoints were typically delivered in infrequent bursts, and inbound contact was often necessary to check on the progress of applications.
OPX was selected against several other providers due to its flexibility, fit to business needs, and rapid deployment abilities.
The initial Pilot was rolled out to the Grants for Dependents (GFD) department, as it had a level of processing complexity that would provide good metrics and a direct comparison around productivity and effectiveness.
The initial Pilot scope allowed OPX to:
Core functionality was agreed upon through initial working sessions with key stakeholders, such as Ops Managers, Team Managers, Assessors, and Business Analysts, where we learned how the organisation was currently working, and where the greatest impact could be made at both a team and wider business level.
A Pilot plan was agreed, which allowed our team to work with key stakeholders to:
A key pre-rollout consideration was to ensure that other parts of the organisation – such as technology, procurement, and HR – were bought into the Pilot.
The right behavioural changes also had to take place. Impacted teams were engaged, to ensure they bought in to and supported the changes to be made.
The Pilot was operational in four weeks, demonstrating how quickly SLC could realise benefits.
The initial Pilot was a complete success and provided:
After further work with the Student Loans project teams, the Pilot scope was extended to cover Core Processing and the DSA teams, which support students with additional and often individually specific needs.
The rollout to additional users and business areas widened the functionality to meet increasing levels of operational complexity.
SLC embarked on a project to blend front-office and back-office staff.
To achieve this CMS developed real-time and historic data interfaces between OPX and NICE WFM, mirroring data transfer for contact centres, making OPX the first back-office system to provide such integration.
Collaboration is king in the OPX Practice. We conducted weekly reviews during mobilisation, monthly catchups during the bedding-in period, and now host annual user groups to give mature clients a voice in the direction of their product.
The OPX platform has now empowered 1,800 employees within Processing, Repayments and Complaints – more than half of the business – to work smarter, more efficiently, and more customer-aware.
Work flows through Student Loans logically and is automatically directed to the staff members best placed to deal with it.
Working with OPX, SLC processes 1.74m applications per year across 220 different streams and has adopted modern and flexible practices.
Corporate Modelling Services (CMS) was founded in 2008 by Alex Allan & Graham Twaddle – experienced and successful innovators in the software space.
Since the beginning, our mission has been to create a practical solution for businesses to alleviate workload and procedural bottlenecks in their back-office, allowing for a perfect synergy between workforce resources and task allocation.
Our team decided to take their collective hundreds of years of business-focused entrepreneurial software development to create a cost-effective, user-friendly, and customisable platform that could help businesses revolutionise their operational productivity and increase capacity.
The result is OPX: an award-winning digital platform that connects and simplifies all your back-office processes into one centralised Operational Insight control centre to transform workforce efficiency.
Once our experts understand your business and workforce needs, we can have OPX up and running in as little as six weeks.
Use our bespoke ROI Calculator to find out the difference OPX could make in your organisation today.