CASE STUDY

Improving Workforce Planning

Improving Workforce Planning for an Expanding Banking Client

How can a rapidly growing bank manage their workforce effectively? The DATAMARK business engineering team introduce a workforce planning toolkit to help their client gain control and valuable insights into their workforce planning process.

A workforce planning toolkit helps a client gain control and valuable insights into their workforce planning process.

Background: A Banking Client is Growing Rapidly

The client is a U.S.-based regional bank with over 1,000 employees, over 60 branches, and nearly $10 billion in assets. The bank’s strong balance sheet and positive outlook suggest steady growth for its financial services.

The Challenge: Optimize Staffing During Growth

The client’s loan portfolio expansion and regional economic health fueled significant year-over-year growth in assets and revenue. While rapid business growth can be beneficial, it also presents a set of unique challenges, particularly when it comes to staffing.

With volumes of work increasing across its business lines, the bank struggles to find an ideal workforce management solution. Would the bank need to double its loan-servicing staff to handle a doubling of its consumer loan business? What would be the ideal staffing solution for such a scenario? The client knew that answering these questions required analyzing its business processes and developing a workforce-planning toolkit for optimal staffing. The client turned to DATAMARK’s Business Engineering team for a solution.

The Solution: DATAMARK’s Workforce Planning Toolkit

DATAMARK’s Business Engineering team knew the client needed a tailored workforce planning toolkit for its core business operations.

The project would be extensive. The DATAMARK team needed to understand the bank’s diverse business processes and subprocesses. This included loan operations, deposit services, treasury management, credit card payments, and ATM operations.

DMi team spent 4 weeks at bank locations, documenting workflow and conducting time studies for each process. DMi examined current employee counts and schedules to understand the ideal staffing levels for each business line. Ultimately, the team analyzed and documented approximately 50 primary business processes and subprocesses. After completing work at the client’s locations, the team built the workforce planning tool at Datamark’s home offices.

Excel-Based Workforce Planning: A customer solution for Banking Processes

Over approximately three weeks, the team developed an Excel-based planning tool covering each of the business processes and accompanying subprocesses managed by the client.

The team chose Excel as the basis for the tool since cross-functional departments within the bank could easily share it. Using Excel, the bank also avoided the time and expense of selecting, evaluating, and purchasing a new software package. As DMi’s team developed the tools, they shared it with the client’s team, who tested and provided feedback.

Ultimately, the Business Engineers delivered the client a customized, tested, and proven “plug-and-play” workforce planning toolkit.

“The toolkit allows bank process managers to forecast the need for staffing by plugging in the anticipated document or transaction volumes,” the team stated. “By giving a clear picture of volumes, process times, and staffing, it also helps managers understand the levels of efficiency being achieved in a process. So, it can help them identify workflow bottlenecks and allows managers to test potential improvements in efficiency by plugging in different staffing numbers into the toolkit.”

The Results: Uncover Inefficiencies to Control Costs & Staffing

DATAMARK’s Business Engineering team successfully met the client’s request for a workforce planning toolkit that would clarify staffing levels, helping to control costs and improve efficiency by preventing unnecessary staff requisitions or overstaffing of the bank’s back-office processes.

“The feedback we received from the client is that the toolkit was exactly what they were looking for,” DMi said. “For example, managers for one business process had requisitioned three more staff members, but our toolkit showed that the process was overstaffed. It raised a red flag for managers to examine the process and its staffing requirements. That’s something that, in the past, may have gone unnoticed and unquestioned.”

Beyond the toolkit, the business engineering engagement delivered several extra values to the client. These included mapping workflow steps for approximately 50 business processes and subprocesses, process time studies, and, where possible, process improvement recommendations that the client could address in the future.

DATAMARK’s business engineering team helped this fast-growing bank gain control and valuable insights into its workforce planning process. The customized toolkit now allows the client to uncover process inefficiencies and add staff more thoughtfully and cost effectively.

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