Franklin Templeton is a global investment firm with teams based all around the globe. The firm had been using the follow-the-sun approach for important tasks, handing off checklists and deadlines from office in office in one time zone to another as each began their days. Maintaining workflows among as many as 250 people in the US, Asia, Brazil, and Europe was prone to error and was becoming cumbersome, however.
That’s when Lia Oyman, an operations manager responsible for innovation and implementing efficiencies, came across OpsCheck.
At first, Oyman only needed a solution that would automatically save a single document at the end of the day in each office, without human intervention. Financial services is full of daily deadlines. A single process might have numerous deadlines over time. Tracking the status of each process is essential. Otherwise, managers don’t know where they need to throw additional resources in order to satisfy their responsibilities to their clients.
OpsCheck representatives showed Oyman how to tailor the platform to Franklin Templeton’s specific needs and answered questions on a daily basis as staff learned how to use the technology.
Today, OpsCheck provides the firm with much more than a checklist to hand off to another office at the end of the day. It’s now the workflow solution for Franklin Templeton’s global teams. Oyman and her colleagues can monitor daily activities, check on deadlines throughout the day, and generate reports that give internal auditors more details on each task, like who has completed it or not. OpsCheck also sends e-mail alerts to the responsible person’s inbox if they miss a deadline.
“There’s a very, very nice monitoring dashboard that supervisors and managers can use throughout the day, to make sure that tasks are being completed on time,” said Oyman. “We’re able to regularly monitor where we stand with our activities. OpsCheck was over and above what we were initially looking for.”
Franklin Templeton is now considering deploying OpsCheck for onboarding brokers, custodians, and others so that they are automatically added to the firm’s workflows.
Oyman would recommend OpsCheck for anyone in the financial industry who uses Excel spreadsheets to track their daily activities, tasks, and workflows; who regularly converts spreadsheets into PDFs to meet internal audit requirements on saving information in time without the possibility of manipulation; and who want more control over daily deadlines. Organizations with remote workers located around the globe can especially benefit, she added.
“You don’t have to be looking over somebody’s shoulders,” said Oyman. “You log onto the platform, see what has been done, what meetings have been scheduled, etcetera. You get a lot more peace of mind.”