An Interview with Bruce Rashke of Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc.

Bruce Rashke is the chief services officer and associated general counsel for Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc. Rashke manages Great Lakes corporate insurance coverages, vendor, and customer contract negotiations. He also has executive oversight of its facilities, purchasing, print, and mailing departments. Rashke, who has worked for Great Lakes since 1998, resides on the security policy committee and is a member of the risk management team.

Huber: Great Lakes is a non-profit corporation with two operating subsidiaries: Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation and Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc. One of the nation’s leading guarantors and servicers of student loans, Great Lakes serves millions of borrowers, the U.S. Department of Education, more than 6,000 schools, and 1,100 lenders across the nation. With this in mind, what does business continuity mean to you?

Rashke: Maintaining a state of operational readiness to meet your business obligations to your customers and your employees.

Huber: What keeps you awake at night?

Rashke: Given my role in the organization it really is “many things.” Right now, weather is always an issue; keeping people safe. In addition, we are in the process of building a new Production print and mail distribution center. This is required as meeting our service level agreement (SLA) which states: “everything that bears todays date must be mailed today.” It is a continuing challenge with the growth in our student loan portfolio. Delays in this project due to weather are a challenge.

Huber: What approach have you taken to ensure you meet your SLA?

Rashke: We have taken a two pronged approach: 1) Focus on a catastrophic disruption. We formed a third-party relationship with an outsourced print facility. This facility has developed the ability to print and mail Great Lakes output in the same manner as if it were printed and mailed internally at Great Lakes. We also routinely test that capability in production on a regular recurring basis. 2) With respect to incidental disruptions in processing, such as a printer part that breaks or a mail inserter malfunction, we have built workarounds to keep the mail stream moving.

Huber: How has the increase in our serviced portfolio of loans challenged you?

Rashke: The window of opportunity to meet the SLA has a fixed end (3:30 p.m. CDT daily). This resulted in the need to increase the capacity of our print and insertion resources. The goal in doing this was tactical and strategic. From a tactical standpoint, as volume and output increased, we needed the ability to print more. From a strategic standpoint, knowing equipment and processes do break, we needed to print and insert faster in order to recover from an incidental disruption. This led us to the conclusion we needed high-speed continuous-feed, print and higher capacity and faster mailing equipment. Given the physical limitations of our current campus, reengineering our current office space was not a viable option. The best alternative was to build a new print mail facility.

Huber: Was completing a business impact analysis (BIA) beneficial in the overall decision making process?

Rashke: The BIA highlighted processes that are required to deliver a service that is expected. It caused us to think critically and strategically as to how we would deliver services when tools and resources were impaired or not available.

Huber: What is your next challenge?

Rashke: Continuing to focus on risk management. Understanding your risks, and on a risk by risk basis, and making strategic decisions as to how we will manage the risk:

1. Eliminate (avoid or transfer)

2. Mitigate (failover, workarounds)

3. Indemnify (Seek remunerations)

Colleen K. Huber, MBCI, CBCP, CBRM, manages the business continuity planning program for Great Lakes in additional to supporting IT development initiatives. Huber is chairperson of the DRJ Editorial Advisory Board and is the chair of DRJ’s glossary committee.