Case Study
Turning Process Intelligence into Recoverable Capacity
One of the largest names in US retirement services couldn’t answer a basic question: where was its Defined Benefit Case Support team’s time actually going? Cognitio mined the raw task data, validated it with the people doing the work, and turned it into a three-area roadmap worth close to 28 hours of recoverable capacity every week.
THE BLIND SPOT
Where Was the Day’s Time Really Going?
Few processes in retirement-plan administration carry as much manual complexity as Defined Benefit Case Support. Analysts handle distributions, annuities, quotes, and corrections across the US and India, and because every calculation still runs through Excel by hand, they’re constantly jumping between systems. The team’s process-intelligence platform could already show utilization and flow, but it stopped short of explaining the choices analysts made along the way, so every improvement conversation came back to guesswork:
- Where is the team’s time going, and where is capacity being lost?
- Why does throughput vary so widely between analysts?
- Where can automation reduce manual calculation and navigation?
TASK MINING IN ACTION
Make the Invisible Visible
Over 34 working days, task-mining software quietly logged analyst activity across Express, Excel, and Mainframe for both the US and India teams. It was the first time anyone had a ground-truth record of how the work actually happened, not just how long it took:
- 10 analysts observed across the US and India
- 1,640 completed cases analyzed
- 15.2 minutes average processing time per case
- 5.4 active hours per day on average, with top performers exceeding 6.5
Important to note: the numbers pointed at habits and workflow, not effort. Analysts spent most of the day in just three applications, yet a surprising share of that time went to navigating and communicating rather than working the case itself, a pattern that exposed manual Excel math, personal tracking spreadsheets, and repeated folder digging that no dashboard had ever surfaced.
THE RECOVERY ROADMAP
Three Areas, One Path to 28 Hours a Week
Cognitio didn’t stop at the data. Every finding was pressure-tested with the client’s subject matter experts, then organized into three areas that ranged from same-week coaching fixes to longer system builds.
- AREA 1: Team Performance & Best Practices
The gap between average and top performers ran as high as 2.8x, and most of it traced back to habits the best analysts already used: calculating directly in Express, reading a request once before acting, and treating Mainframe as a lookup tool rather than a workspace.
~3.4 hours per week recoverable - AREA 2: Excel & Navigation Efficiencies
A large share of the week was disappearing into spreadsheets: standalone calculators, personal trackers, and manual checklists living outside the core system. Moving them into Express and a shared dashboard closes most of that gap.
~7.8 hours per week recoverable - AREA 3: System Automation
Two structural fixes stood out: linking Express directly to the document repository so analysts stop hunting through folders, and letting an event-driven sync update Salesforce automatically instead of by hand.
~17 hours per week recoverable
The Outcome
28 Hours a Week, Reclaimed
Between coaching, tooling, and automation, the roadmap adds up to roughly 28 hours of recoverable capacity a week, close to 0.85 FTE, without a single new hire. More lasting than the number itself was the shift in conversation: leadership stopped comparing analysts to each other and started redesigning the process they all worked within, building a foundation the team can keep scaling from.
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