Nuts & Bolts

This issue’s Nuts & Bolts column is a departure from our usual tutorial format. In keeping with this newsletter’s focus on model delivery, we discuss the landscape and conditions under which the managed account industry is working to develop best practices and communication standards for sharing portfolio models among model providers and recipients.

Welcome to this installment of our Nuts & Bolts series, designed to help you and your team with tips and techniques to improve productivity and efficiency. In this article, we’ll tackle one of the toughest challenges managed account service teams face—how to handle the various and disparate streams of client requests while still maintaining operational consistency.

Welcome to the third article in our series on workflow techniques for optimizing managed account operations. Our previous articles explored two common managed account client service requests, distributions and tax harvests. In the first article, we took stock of participants, and created swimlane diagrams of our current state processes based on the type of request. In the second article, we discussed techniques for analyzing those flows to find opportunities to optimize. Now, we’re ready to put those techniques to work, and map out our “to-be” process.

In the last edition of Peridrome Perspectives, we discussed how to identify critical processes and develop diagram flows. We now have a set of swimlane diagrams we can use for analysis of our current state operations. In this article, we’ll cover techniques to analyze our current state processes to find opportunities to optimize them.

With today’s emphasis on cost take-outs and managing more with less, managed solutions firms are more challenged than ever to optimize operations. However, the opportunistic nature of how advisor and distribution relationships are formed among participants means that key operational processes often develop organically. While many experienced operations professionals excel at quickly establishing procedures for supporting new business, over time, consistency among critical process flows decreases. Documentation of procedure may no longer be in sync with the actual procedure followed.