AUTOMATED BUSINESS PROCESSING ISN’T MAGIC

– BUT THE RESULTS SURE COME CLOSE

How Big Brothers & Big Sisters used the internet to streamline
their business processes to match volunteers with kids
– faster and more cost efficiently

Big Brothers and Big Sisters

of Calgary and Area
Table of Contents

Sharing a Little Magic — 3

What’s Wrong with this Picture? — 4

The Human Factor — 7

The Right Tools for the Right Job — 8

Getting The Job Done — 9

Conclusion — 10
Sharing A Little Magic “Most recently, Clarity has
begun working on provid-
ing BBBS Calgary with an
In today’s highly competitive internet savvy world, online application process.
the need for business process automation and This new functionality will
the ability to use the internet to streamline busi- allow BBBS Calgary to im-
ness processes is greater than ever before. While prove customer service and
the internet can bring your prospective clients to provide quicker response to
you quickly and easily, the true test of an effec- new mentor applicants. Clar-
tive website does not only lie in how many people ity is our internet mentor. Like
visit your site, but whether or not it provides you our Big Brother and Big Sister
with the opportunity to turn those prospects into volunteers, they know that
real clients. strong health relationships
ultimately benefit both parties,
The Big Brothers & Big Sisters of Calgary recently and build capacity, success
faced a similar challenge. They needed to find a and resiliency. We cannot
way to use this technology to provide people with repay them for the value of
the opportunity to volunteer and help give back the work that they do.”
to the community. It wasn’t enough to simply
have their organizational information available if it Big Brothers & Big Sisters of
didn’t help produce measurable results. Because Calgary and Area
in this case, the outcome doesn’t just affect the
organization’s bottom line – it affects the lives of
our children.

Since 1998, Clarity.ca Inc. (Clarity) has had the

honor of working as a corporate community part-
ner with the Big Brothers & Big Sisters (BBBS) of Cal-
gary and Area to ensure the most time and cost
efficient online services are available to both their
volunteers and program participants. This new
project presented the chance for Clarity to rise to
the challenge once again and help BBBS expand
and enhance the way they serve the community
even more

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What’s Wrong with this Picture?
At the end of the day, state of the art technol-
ogy and creative genius is of no use to anyone if
you don’t know how to use it to produce practi-
cal results. The BBBS project took full advantage
of Clarity’s team of experienced industry workflow
experts to do just that and together they clearly
defined exactly what their new and unique online
business processing needs were.
As with all of Clarity’s long-term client relationships,
the project analysis process with BBBS has become
a very intuitive and productive one. This critical
front-end analysis phase of the project resulted in
the identification of the root cause of the difficul-
ties the organization was facing, which rested in
their ability to process and screen potential men-
tors on a timely basis.
Like any workflow processing problem, BBBS’s
inability to screen and process potential mentors
on a timely basis had created challenges at the
most fundamental level of their internal day-to-day
operations. Clarity’s team of experts did what they
do best and got to work to explore the practical
realities of the mentor volunteer workflow process.
Once contacted, the staff then had to create
an information package which incurred notable
administrative costs including photocopying, infor-
mation package collation, postage expenses and
the staff’s time to execute all of the tasks associated
with the initial mentor volunteer screening process.
Responsibility then fell to the staff to track and
follow-up information request calls to potential
mentors that did not respond, and they were
often told that the information sent to them had
never arrived in the mail or the prospect had
lost the single hard copy package sent. In other
words, this antiquated process of information dis-
tribution was simply not working well in the very
busy lives of individuals in today’s fast-paced
world. This fact was resulting in the loss of potential
mentor volunteers and was a highly inefficient use
of the BBBS staff’s time that had to make multiple
telephone calls just to reach the interview stage of
the application process.

Right from the start of this analysis process, Clarity

discovered that prospective mentor volunteers did
not have the basic information they required read-
ily available to them in order to seriously consider
and make an educated decision about whether
or not participating in this program was right for
themselves. This reality then required prospects to
take the initiative and call the organization just to
make a request for the information they needed
to move to the next decision-making step.

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The final analysis of the workflow process revealed
the key issues that needed to be resolved to enable
BBBS to serve their community at the highest level
as being:
1. Eliminating the lengthily lag time in processing
mentor applications which sent the wrong mes-
sage to potential mentors and often resulted in
the loss of prospective volunteers,
2. The need to take advantage of their existing
technology to provide prompt and easily ac-
cessible information dissemination services to
provide the best customer service possible to
prospective volunteers, and
3. Creating a workflow system that utilized the
BBBS’s staff time and administrative budget in a
much more cost and time efficient manner.
When considering internal operational changes,
we are the first ones to advise our clients that
there is a great deal more to finding an effective
solution than simply purchasing some new techni-
cal ‘tool’ or program. The typical project analysis
process for this type of project considers a variety
of relevant issues and factors with just a few of
them including:
Analysis of existing business processes
In order to know what you need to change or
add, you need to know what you have. This pro-
cess includes review of the primary methodologies
being used to collect, analyze, share and process
information and carefully mapping out how each
associated business process is implemented to
achieve a successful result.
This part of the analysis process gives you a clear
picture of the material, administrative and pro-
cessing costs you are incurring with your current
non-automated business processing system. The
relevant business processes include any process
that involves the movement and processing of
paper, multiple authorizations and versioning con-
trol over multiple geographic regions.
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 Defining the needs of your target market

By accurately defining the needs of your target

market/users, you can make changes to your
existing business processing system that are de-
signed to better meet the practical needs of your
prospective/existing clients and your organization.
A few of these requirements might include:

● Understanding how much time users spend

on a web site when looking for your services,

● What kind of information they are typically

seeking, and

● What information they are most comfortable

sharing and how to make it as easy and time
efficient as possible for prospects to do so.

Addressing these user needs will greatly enhance

the measurable online sales and marketing results
that your new automated business processes can
achieve.

Technical/System Assessment

Integrating new business development tools and

applications must be selected and customized
to work seamlessly with your existing hardware
system and software applications. Clarity’s im-
pressive team of technical experts works closely
with your IT division to ensure your newly designed
business processing applications are successfully
implemented in a way that not only meets but
compliments your current system requirements.

6
The Human Factor
Over the last decade alone, there has been an
immeasurable advancement in the development
of and the way technology is used within the
business world. Consequently, many businesses
have had to go through a ‘trial by fire’ learning
process to discover what actually works for their
organization and their clients, relative to what
they were promised by the producers of the ‘latest
and greatest’ technological business tool. Unfor-
tunately, this path of discovery can often end up
costing an organization a great deal of money
and even the loss of personnel in the process.
Clarity has always understood that no one knows
their business, their people and their customer
needs better than their clients do. Clarity’s business
objective is to tap into that unique expertise to
identify and design custom business processing
tools and applications that will meet the require-
ments of their clients on all relevant organization-
al, operational and customer service levels. All of
Clarity’s business processing tools and applications
are designed with one thing in mind – the people
using them.
Clarity’s resolve couldn’t have been more evident
than with the latest BBBS project. When this project
began, the backlog of unprocessed mentor ap-
plications already encompassed a six-week time
period. This problem created frustration to not
only potential mentors and the families of children
waiting to be matched with their mentors, but
with the dedicated and caring staff of BBBS who
wanted nothing more than to have the ability to
do what they had joined BBBS to do in the first
place, help make the lives of countless children
happier and more rewarding.
This same goal holds true for all of Clarity’s clientele
no matter what field or industry they serve. An or-
ganization succeeds in today’s globally competi-
tive marketplace by being able to anticipate and
meet the needs of customers efficiently and cost
effectively. The employees of any organization
succeed by ensuring their roles help successfully fill
this critical need and in doing so their prospects
become customers. In order to turn these prospects
into customers, the organization must provide their
people with the right tools for the right job.
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The Right Tools for the Right Job
While the value of a content management
system (CMS) has grown evident over the past
few years, what has become equally evident is
the need to have content management tools
that are specifically designed to meet the exact-
ing requirements of each organization. There is
no such thing as a ‘cookie cutter’ organization
and consequently, trying to implement and use
a ‘cookie cutter’ content management system
simply does not work.
To answer the call for specialized, user friendly
and time and cost efficient content management
tools, Clarity has created the Clarity Content Man-
ager (CCM 5). CCM 5 is an easy to use Web-based
application that allows content owners to collabo-
rate on the ongoing content creation, manage-
ment and publication of all types of content. This
highly intuitive system is designed to ensure that
the unique automated business processing needs
of each organization are identified, incorporated
and implemented seamlessly into your existing
business processing system.
The power and flexibility of the CCM 5 was un-
mistakable throughout this latest project with
BBBS. Using the CCM 5 and one of Clarity’s many
custom form builder tools, an automated system
to manage and process BBBS online applications
was created and implemented. The user feedback
and the results achieved, by both the prospective
mentor volunteers and the dedicated staff of BBBS
is remarkable.
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When former potential mentor volunteers discov-
ered the new online application process was in
place, many of them opted to go ahead and
become mentors because the entire application
process had been simplified and now worked with
their schedules. Since launching the online mentor
application form, every new mentor volunteer has
indicated that they used this online service to apply,
where previously, many potential volunteers stated
disappointment when they were told that the online
application service was not available. Additionally,
volunteers have stated that they thoroughly enjoy
having the online program reference information
available to them at any time and have indicated
to BBBS staff that this information has been instru-
mental in helping them realize that this was the
right program for them to participate in.
From an administrative standpoint, the staff now
only has to call each volunteer once after they
eceived the completed online application with
the administrative cost of creating and sending
information packages becoming almost com-
pletely a thing of the past. Since BBBS can now
immediately respond to applications being
emailed, Intake staff are directing their time and
energy only to those persons that are genuinely
interested in participating in the program. True
excellence in customer service can now be given
to the “serious” volunteer that is choosing to make
such a positive difference in our community.
Getting the Job Done
Having online application forms enabled the
BBBS administrative staff to successfully process
and eliminate the backlog of mentor application
forms and has resulted in a significant reduction of
the time it now takes for application forms to be
processed. Applicants who visit the Big Brothers
and Big Sisters of Calgary and Area website find
a simple and convenient way of filling out an ap-
plication form —which can also be easily filled out
at any other time via a login area, with a secure
username and password.

Finally, all mentor application forms are validated,

submitted and saved in a database for review
by the BBBS administration and then notified via
automated email. Saving time and resources by
simplifying complex tasks such as sending out
reference forms to email addresses that were
provided by the applicant, can be carried out
once the application has been reviewed and
approved. Without this new automated business
process tool, this procedure required time being
spent contacting references and entering data
from paper forms instead of enabling the prompt
and appropriate pairing of BBBS volunteers to the
children waiting for a mentor.

Statistically, using the online mentor application

service has shown that the completed applica-
tion numbers have increased by approximately
30% while the work load required by the BBBS staff
to complete the application process has been
reduced by about 30%.

In this case the results are not only measurable

– they’re obvious – just by looking in the faces
of the children when they meet their new friend
and mentor.

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 Big Brothers & Big Sisters of
Canada embraces the vision
that “every child in Canada
who needs a mentor has a
mentor. We recognize that
we can not do this alone and
know that only in joining with
our community partners will
we be able to make a mean-
ingful difference in the lives of
more children and youth.
Please accept our gratitude
for the commitment you dis-
play in your community to
help us realize our shared
vision and to make a differ-
ence in the lives of Canadian
Children.
Bruce MacDonald
President & CEO
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Conclusion
The real test of the success or failure of any new
business tool must be based upon measurable
results. Clarity knows that the most critical phase
of any project is the initial analysis process to
accurately determine what our client needs really
are and equally importantly – what they are not.
If it isn’t broken – we don’t fix it.
Whether it’s providing expert consulting, applica-
tion development, application integration, cre-
ative design, employee training and/or intranet
development services – our impressive team of ex-
perienced multi-disciplined professionals enables
us to ensure that our clients are presented with
only the most effective and cost efficient solutions
available to support and achieve their unique
organizational and customer service goals.
To explore what innovative solutions Clarity can
provide your organization with or to request more
information, please call: (403) 705-5900 or select
Clarity.ca.