Discussion Board

Today, Jun 2005

Q: Item Per Hour Calculation

I am interested in learning how other wholesale remittance shops calculate their Items Per Hour (IPH). I feel we could be doing it better and am looking for suggestions. We currently use a very simple calculation of how many items processed divided by number of hours spent processing. What concerns me is that it is not taking into account hours that we are paying staff that they may not be putting towards production, and we are not counting any hours spent doing data entry, credit cards or image scanning. Does anyone have any thoughts?

RE: Productivity - Items Per Hour

While I do not currently work at a Wholesale Lockbox, we do a lot of "exception" work. (I have in the past had experience with Lockbox Operations) The best way I found to figure IPH is to allow the individual operators to set the pace. Have three operators, under supervision, operate for one hour. Use a cross section of operators, i.e. ; expert, amateur, novice. Get the average of work processed from the three (add all work completed in the hour and divide by three). This is your base line for production.

If you find, under supervision, the average operator rate is, for example, one tray per hour hand-opening and you have six operators, you should be averaging about six trays per hour. (The key words are "under supervision").

If you have operators that are actually running equipment that assists in the opening or processing of mail, your vendor should be able to give you base line production rates for the particular piece of equipment operating. I would still use the above example for other areas including data entry.

After setting the "expectation" for the operators, make sure they are being held accountable for maintaining those expectations and receiving the necessary training to exceed those expectations. Feedback on how they are doing is more important than actually setting the expectation. I found the workflow to be a very important factor in your IPH. If the work is not being consistently reviewed and made available and workflow maintained your IPH will suffer. Hope this helps.

Q: Performance Indicators

Is anyone aware of industry performance indicators describing top quartile performance related to payment mis-applies and encoding errors. I have always heard 3-5 per 100,000 is considered good, but I want to determine values in terms of first, second, third, and fourth quartile performance. Anyone know of a resource or familiar with other performance values being used?

Q: Check Fraud:

I have had inquiries on check fraud, ways to detect it and ways to combat it in the remittance processing centers. Does anybody have sources of information on this subject, or any policies and procedures or practices in place they could share?

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