Introduction
As a 132-year-old company, Northern Trust has built strong institutional knowledge around delivering quality service and results to clients.
Pete Cherecwich, President of Northern Trust Asset Servicing, knew that in order to continue raising the bar on client service, he needed to find innovative ways to capture and spread this knowledge across all partners and increase the productivity of his teams.
“In our business, what matters most is our ability to deliver outstanding service and value for our clients. We’re always seeking out innovative solutions to stay ahead of the curve. Our partnership with Scribe is part of our ongoing commitment to use cutting-edge technology to deliver excellent service. Scribe helps us accomplish this without sacrificing the employee experience; on the contrary, it is making our employees more productive.”
- Pete Cherecwich, President of Asset Servicing
As a large, complex financial institution, Northern Trust runs on processes. Yet, creating and maintaining an up-to-date record of all of those processes, in a format employees can actually use, is a challenge for any scaled organization.
As a result, it can be difficult to ensure all employees are following the same, standard processes; this represents a productivity drag, or even worse, inferior client service and increased risk exposure.
Because process adherence is so important, Northern Trust’s partners dedicate real time to establishing and sharing procedures.
Pete knew that if he could find ways to improve knowledge sharing and accessibility, it would help improve how Northern Trust services clients. Pete brought Scribe into Northern Trust as an easy-to-use tool for partners to document and share their global processes across the organization.
“Scribe is helping us solve a problem that’s as old as time. We’re thrilled with how intuitive and user-friendly Scribe is, and we’ve truly seen the results, both quantitatively and anecdotally. It's helping to change the way we work, as we continue to find new ways to utilize the platform.”
- Pete Cherecwich, President of Asset Servicing
Scribe’s automatic step-by-step guides have enabled Northern Trust to scale the institutional knowledge of their tenured, knowledge-rich partners and make it accessible to everyone across their global organization (including their newest partners).
As more departments deploy Scribe, Northern Trust continues to find new applications. Scribe can be used anywhere partners need to capture and share how to do a process — such as:
- Documenting standard operating procedures.
- Augmenting training programs.
- Removing barriers to global collaboration.
- Strengthening risk and compliance management.
Here are a few snapshots of these examples.
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Document standard operating procedures
All standard operating procedures (SOPs) at Northern Trust are fully documented. These procedures include detailed step-by-step process guides which help standardize daily activity.
This documentation is critical, but traditionally, quite time-consuming as it is done manually. Northern Trust teams have been able to use Scribe to streamline detailed procedure guides and SOPs in significantly less time; now, partners have process documentation available at their fingertips.
“At Northern Trust we have a robust approach to maintaining formal business procedures, which is important for continuity, accuracy and to meet regulatory requirements. However, previously when procedures were updated, it took team members away from business-as-usual and was very time consuming to manually type the step-by-step instructions and insert screenshots. With Scribe our team has been able to create the detailed step-by-step process guides we need as part of our overall formal procedure documentation in so much less time.”
-Michelle Jamison, Manager Depositary Operations
Augment traditional training programs
Like any big organization, Northern Trust has a thorough training program for employees — whether onboarding new hires or educating existing employees on the latest processes. Scaling remote training for a 20,000+ person company proved challenging when the pandemic hit.
The Global Training Organization is able to use Scribe to complement their existing training — for example, providing step-by-step guides as leave-behinds following live trainings.
Using Scribe helped Northern Trust reduce the amount of time spent building training material, and new hires reported faster training times thanks to Scribe’s on-demand documents.
Remove barriers to global collaboration
Northern Trust is also using Scribe to help global teams collaborate with each other more easily.
As a global organization with locations around the world, teams can more easily communicate and collaborate by using Scribe to help standardize process documentation.
As part of regular training sessions, cross-training teams conduct detailed walkthroughs during live meetings, which can be challenging to accommodate across different regions and time zones.
With Scribe, even the most nuanced tasks can be captured and communicated. Partners simply activate Scribe, run through their process, and Scribe automatically generates step-by-step guides. The result is the ability to seamlessly cross-train on tasks and transition responsibilities across geographies and time zones without disruptions.
“In efforts to streamline our processes and make the business more efficient, we continually consolidate responsibilities within functional pods and transition some work between offices around the globe. Having Scribe makes the necessary documentation significantly easier to generate, and enables teams to execute much of the transition asynchronously.”
-Liam Butler, COO Northern Trust Ireland
Strengthening risk & compliance management
As a financial institution, Northern Trust is diligent about maintaining risk oversight across all fronts. By using Scribe, Northern Trust gives their global employees the tools to follow processes more easily and in compliance with local regulations and law.
Now, creating compliance documentation can be as easy as auto-generating a step-by-step Scribe to provide partners with access to standardized procedures.
“Risk management and resiliency are synonymous with productivity here at Northern Trust. Our goal is to drive risk reduction through data and digital tools, and Scribe is a key part of that strategy.”
-John Blackburn, Chief Productivity Officer
Conclusion
By rolling Scribe out across Northern Trust, Pete has empowered his teams to document and follow processes thoroughly, helping to reduce risk and maximize productivity. Now, processes are documented, questions can be easily answered, and teams can spend more time delivering impact for their clients.
Based on an internal survey, teams reduced time spent on non-client tasks by 69 percent1 — representing significant savings for the business each year.
Teams also reported an increase in employee satisfaction, faster training times, and improved performance towards KPIs.
Scribe has provided a tool to allow Northern Trust to streamline their processes and work more seamlessly, giving partners more time to focus on delivering service to their clients.
1 Operational Excellence Study. Enlighten. December 9, 2020. Internal Survey.
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