Process Innovation — Republic of Korea Real Estate Registry
Process Innovation | South Korea Real Estate Registry
As a prelude to introducing information technology, improved business processes for managing land and building records in the 193 registry offices across the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and established an overall transition approach for implementation.
BACKGROUND
The Supreme Court of Korea is responsible for the Real Estate Registry, which records ownership and rights associated with both land and buildings across Korea. In 1993 the Real Estate Registry was deployed in 193 local registry offices throughout the country.
After a preliminary study identified the benefits and feasibility of introducing an automated registry, the Supreme Court sought a business partner to integrate a system and assist with data conversion.
Systems Technology Management (STM) the joint venture of LG and EDS in Korea sought to bid and contacted EDS for resources with expertise in registry offices and digital imaging.
OPPORTUNITY
- Registry office records were primarily housed in a series of books for land and a separate series of books for buildings
- All existing work processes involving the land and building records were manual. To produce the transcripts required for land and property transactions, each office dedicated considerable effort to photocopying the applicable pages after locating the corresponding entries.
- The oldest records were primarily written using Chinese symbols. Records created during the time of Japanese rule between the world wars typically were written in Japanese. After the end of Japanese rule, records were predominantly written using Hangul (the Korean alphabet) with some records and almost all names written with Chinese symbols.
- As active records, all registers could only be out of circulation for a very short time during conversion.
OUTCOMES
- Worth in excess of US$ 250 million (and later expanded), the contract award established STM as the largest system integrator working in Korea. For his contributions to the proposal and contract award, Michael received special recognition from STM.
- Working in parallel development of the data conversion strategy, Michael's team completed the business process recommendations and change plan in the first six months of the initiative.
- The comprehensive business process recommendations and transformation plan led to improved accuracy, increased accessibility, and reduced workload and processing time.
- After implementing the resulting system, the Supreme Court of Korea Real Estate Registry identified process efficiency gains of 40%, and an overall annual benefit exceeding US$ 1.4 billion.
CONSULTING RESPONSE
Michael travelled to Korea to assist with proposal development. Once there, he differentiated the experience available to the STM team by visiting a local registry office and meeting with officials representing the Supreme Court during proposal development. From the visits he learned of the significant need to reengineer office work processes in preparation for the introduction of the planned systems.
On award of the contract, Michael's background with conversion and implementation at Teranet led to him being positioned in oversight of the reengineering and transition planning initiative. Key considerations for the successful completion of this stage of work:
- Leading an international team of consultants, augmented by the client’s subject matter experts, in applying a process engineering approach
- Tailoring the workshop-oriented business process reengineering approach to embrace cultural considerations that did not readily embrace group process.
- Identifying registry office business process impacts in parallel with a system development team establishing business requirements and a proof-of-concept prototype.
- Addressing imaging of paper-based abstract records in collaboration with a team developing the strategy for data conversion, and assessing the impact on the registry of on- and off-demand strategies for data conversion.
- Leveraging the experience of Teranet in planning for implementation by allowing for participation of key resources in the project.
- Focusing on knowledge transfer to the client and local project team both of the methodological approach and of the insights and constraints involved in the reengineered business processes.
- Engaging proactively and often with the client's Fairness Advisor to discuss and consider recommended "course corrections" during the project, including omitting planned deliverables that became redundant as the work unfolded.
- Overcoming the linguistic and cultural implications of non-Korean speaking consultants working with a Korean-speaking client and local project team — including allowing time for simultaneous translation and for translation of written materials.