Case Study: Carte Blanche Simplified Complex Workflows With Netcall

Award-winning creator, distributor and licensor of branded gifts and cards, Carte Blanche, is well known for Tatty Teddy, the cute grey bear with a blue nose.

The company was founded in 1987 with a dream and a collection of just 12 greetings cards. More than 30 years on, design and innovation are at the very core of the Carte Blanche business.

The Challenge

In 2019, Carte Blanche embarked on a sustained period of change and an ambition to enhance productivity.

Dealing with the implementation of two new software systems (MS Dynamics and Perfion), personnel changes and diversification of product offering, the organization needed to re-evaluate operating procedures.

If Carte Blanche was to benefit from greater clarity and understanding of their processes, they would need to be clear on the current state of the organization, before they started to make any changes. They used Liberty Spark, our process improvement and mapping software, to embark on this initiative.

Solution

Carte Blanche first used Liberty Spark to record and clarify everyday business processes. As a visual tool, Spark facilitated workshops, allowing the team to map at the speed of conversation while colleagues focused on the realities of the process. It quickly became integral for analysis and improvement.

During mapping, issues and queries were logged directly in the process map as simple attachments. This meant the team could stay engaged in discussions while capturing important details, later exporting them as issue logs and using them as checklists for improvement.

In the past, process mapping had failed, sticky notes were laborious and inaccurate, and archaic software restricted access to a single expert.

Spark solved both problems. Because processes evolve, the ability to easily access, understand, and update them was vital.

By visually displaying complex areas, Spark encouraged teams to collectively identify improvements and challenged them to think differently.

It became a tool for engaging colleagues, clarifying technical processes, and dispelling myths around system issues.

When focusing on the UK independent sales process, a complex, variable-driven workflow, Spark helped incorporate input from multiple teams and systems. The result was clear documentation, greater collaboration, and the removal of perceived issues and misunderstandings.

The Result

• Process mapped Procurement & Inventory, Sales Orders & Fulfilment and Product Management systems.
• Using Liberty Spark, Carte Blanche has explored the possibilities of using responsibility matrices.
• Using the RATSI method they have defined who is doing the work, who is signing off, who is helping and who is informed. This helps everyone to understand what people do, create job descriptions, understand workloads and help each other.
• Employees have complete clarity over their roles. They can use Spark to navigate and understand their roles, what is expected of them, where they fit in the process, to whom they speak to understand an issue and appreciate why their role is vital.
• Liberty Spark has become the place to hold all vital information.

“We really understood through Liberty Spark that we could clean up a messy process. It has saved us a huge amount of time by streamlining our flow of activity and understanding that, by resolving issues earlier on in the process, we could make it easier for our people to do their jobs.

There really is an amazing human centric benefit to Liberty Spark beyond the mechanics of process mapping,” said Stuart Morgan, Process Engineer and Carte Blanche.

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This post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall - view the original article.

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Reviewed by: Rachael Trickey