case study: Commercial Productivity Uplift

BACKGROUND

Our client, the commercial lending division of a leading Australian banks' middle office function, had recently been restructured into a regional model with offices in all mainland capitals. Processing volumes were increasing rapidly as a result of a significant increase in the number of relationship managers. The increased volume necessitated long hours in the middle office and resulted in poor quality of service. Overtime costs escalated, morale plummeted and turnover exacerbated the situation. The bank was caught in a resourcing squeeze, unable to hire enough good people and train them while being unable to extract maximum performance from the existing workforce.

The Divisional General Manager brought in a traditional consulting firm to drive performance improvement. However their approach failed due to lack of engagement and over-emphasis on benchmarks and inflexible “best practices”.

OUR ROLE

Our Workforce Improvement solution is focused on empowering line managers to drive the improvement with coaching and facilitation from our experienced consultants.

Our approach included the implementation of the following key objectives:

Introduction of operations management capabilities, tools and techniques
Introduction of consistent and meaningful operational performance measures
Drive productivity and enable processing of increasing volumes
Drive tangible results quickly and stabilise operations
Improve staff engagement and reduce turnover

RESULT

Our Workforce Improvement program delivered impressive results:

37% productivity improvement
10% reduction in FTE without reducing quality or service
Achieved consistent delivery against service levels
Significantly reduced rework
Unit Cost reductions in the order of 20%
Employee engagement survey results improved considerably
Improved cross skilling, enabling sharing of resources across teams to meet demand fluctuations
Productivity data is now used to support management decisions, eg rewards, staffing levels, career progression
Processes can now be compared based on unit costs to determine which are the most efficient and effective and has since aligned processes across states.

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