Brink’s Bolivia was looking for innovative ways to mitigate pain points in its ATM service. In cases where the ATM report and the actual amount collected from the ATM differ, Brink’s has to either prove the imbalance is not their responsibility or pay a refund to the Bank. While imbalances are usually small, investigations demand substantial personnel time and can have a negative effect on Brinks’ customer relationships.

Using the SIT thinking tool Division, Brink’s separated the process of taking money out of an ATM into multiple steps and randomly changed the order of the stages. In one iteration of this exercise, Brink’s placed the “refund the bank” stage immediately after the “realizing there’s an imbalance” stage.

This change in the process led the Brink’s team to realize that negotiations following each recorded imbalance are excessive. Instead, they found that holding one monthly meeting to cover all imbalances throughout the month would reduce the time and energy spent on reviewing discrepancies and would decrease the need to pass money back and forth. Both Brink’s employees and clients preferred the new process, and the change helped fortify Brinks’ position in the banking sector.