Innovative Credit Union Taps The Lab Consulting for End-to-End Process Mapping and Automation Implementation
SYRACUSE, NY / ACCESS Newswire / February 4, 2025 / Empower Federal Credit Union is pleased to announce the results of its recent, ongoing strategic initiative to improve operational efficiency, scalability, end-to-end processes, and experience for its more than 280,000 members and 600 employees.
By recently engaging with Houston-based The Lab Consulting to business-process-map the organization, Empower FCU was able to identify hundreds of valuable process improvements, identify high-value automation use cases, and define an implementation roadmap for self-sustaining their new automation program.
The initiative was extensive, fast paced, and detailed. Thousands of work activities-scrutinized down to the one-to-three-minute-activity level-were mapped. Over 100 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) use cases were identified, business value quantified, and each prioritized for implementation. Additionally, more than 150 industry best practices-spanning people, processes, and technology-were identified as part of the effort.
End-to-end business processes mapped included retail new-account opening; branch operations and support; consumer, mortgage, and commercial loan origination and servicing; card operations; and payments and deposit operations.
Implementation of the identified opportunities was prioritized by benefits across three waves in a "crawl/walk/run" cadence, with the first implementation wave already complete. Five select Robotic Process Automation "bots" already implemented for Empower FCU, in partnership with The Lab's US-based development team, include: Right-to-Offset, ACH Returns, General-Ledger Balancing, Account Warning Flag Removal, and Delinquent Loan Charge Offs.
"Our dedication to process improvement is anchored by a commitment to reduce friction for our members and employees. With an established goal to decrease processing times by eliminating manual tasks, we partnered with The Lab and started our continuous improvement journey. Through business-process mapping we've now identified, prioritized, and implemented improvements that allow our team to focus on higher-value work while minimizing tedious tasks," said Jen Wolfe, EVP/COO, Empower FCU.
Contact Information:
Chris Keller | Chief Marketing Officer
Empower FCU
ckeller@empowerfcu.com
Chris Wilds | Director, Automation
The Lab Consulting
cwilds@thelabconsulting.com
About Empower FCU
Empower Federal Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative owned by and operated for its members since its founding in 1939. Since then, Empower FCU has grown to over $3.8 billion in assets, serving more than 280,000 members, with 24 branch locations across upstate New York. To learn more, visit www.empowerfcu.com.
About The Lab Consulting
Houston-based The Lab Consulting is a leading provider of process improvement and data standardization for white-collar work, or "knowledge work." The Lab's "process-first" approach has accelerated strategic benefits for credit unions and banks with process standardization, robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and more. Since 1993, The Lab has helped businesses worldwide to reclaim capacity, preserve margin and increase sales. Visit thelabconsulting.com.
SOURCE: The Lab Consulting
