CASE STUDY
Foreign trade is a major component of Argentina ’ s economy . In 2021 , imports and exports combined to represent 45 % of the country ’ s gross domestic product ( GDP ) – according to INDEC , the National Institute of Statistics and Census of Argentina .
And BBVA , the country ’ s oldest private bank , is a leading engine of Argentina ’ s foreign trade transactions .
So , when the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine precipitated rapid economic changes around the world , prompting the Central Bank of Argentina to implement new , emergency regulations on foreign trade , BBVA and its competitors had very little time to adapt .
“ We have had so many modifications to our processes caused by the changes in foreign trade rules and government pressure in the country ,” said Leonardo Rojas , BBVA Argentina ’ s Head of Operations .
On a typical day , analysts on the bank ’ s Foreign Trade Operations team process more than 400 trade-related transactions , many for corporate customers and some valued in the millions of dollars . The new regulations required companies to present additional documentation and justifications before making payments abroad , which in turn necessitated numerous new control processes for BBVA .
The processes were so new , they needed to be done manually . Overall transaction processing time jumped to five or six days , when BBVA wanted to limit it to two .
“ International trade operations are carried out with US dollars ,” said Rojas .
“ The exchange rate between US dollars and Argentine pesos fluctuates so much that it is important to complete the operation quickly .
“ For each day it takes to process , the costs for the client could increase due to the rate changes .”
And adding more headcount was not a viable option .
WE ’ RE GETTING REQUESTS FROM OTHER TEAMS – THEY WANT TO DO WHAT WE ’ VE DONE .
“ Applying more complex controls meant more workload for the team ,” said Rojas .
“ But adding more analysts would result in higher operating costs and higher commissions for our customers . The market for foreign trade analysts is scarce , and it is a highly demanded profile .”
Rojas and coworker Mauricio Vidaurrázaga , Head of Business Execution and Process Engineering , wanted to try to regain efficiencies by optimizing processes .
They suspected that unintentional rework occurred while the team performed all of the newly mandated checks and controls on top of their traditional processes . But they needed a way to pinpoint exactly where this was happening .
In November 2021 , Rojas and Vidaurrázaga launched BBVA ’ s Foreign Trade Process Reengineering Project and tested several process mining tools .
A demo of IBM Process Mining software convinced them that they ’ d found their solution and they engaged the IBM Customer Success team for help implementing the software on IBM Cloud to avoid any hardware constraints at the bank .
The IBM and BBVA teams also containerized the Process Mining software on the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud platform .
As a first step in the reengineering project , Rojas , Vidaurrázaga and the team obtained event logs of BBVA ’ s foreign trade system from the BBVA IT team and fed the data into the Process Mining tool , generating a visual map of the foreign trade processes that showed every step and indicated typical as well as atypical process flows .
The tool ’ s analytics also provided statistics about process time and efficiency and offered recommendations for improvements . “ We ’ d suspected there was a lot of rework but we didn ’ t know exactly where or when or how much impact it was having ,” said Vidaurrázaga .
“ Process Mining let us put real data to our perception . We could actually see when and where teams were repeating tasks , and we could quantify the impact and start analyzing the root causes .”
They also uncovered bottlenecks . A major one related to a step in the process that relied on a Central Bank verification service available only between 8am and 5pm .
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