HRM PRACTICES

HRM Practices

HRM Practices

Introduction

As the banking industry gathers momentum supported by high economic growth, the skills sets in the banking industry are being stretched. The new benchmark for competitive edge has been raised as never before. It is becoming imperative for banks to offer new products and enhance customer service levels albeit with low margins. The focus is on customer service to sustain customer loyalty.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group is the eighth largest bank in the world with a market capitalisation of £49bn. The three principal areas of its income generation are the UK, Europe, and the US. The bulk of both the group's income and assets continues to be generated in Europe. Its mainstream, UK banking operation has a 'back office' processing strategy run through the Manufacturing division, which consists of ten separate business areas and around 28,000 manufacturing employees, who work in 92 specialist centres.

When operating at this scale, it is essential that an organisation can measure operational performance, manage its people and control workflow efficiently and effectively.

In the past, component business areas in manufacturing operated in isolation, making comparable performance difficult to ascertain and quantify. This also made it more difficult to calculate and track the impact of continuous-improvement activity, growth, process volumes and flows (particularly where the process crosses business areas) and identify business trends. Historically, this was achieved through a number of bespoke methods and systems that had developed organically in each business area. There was, therefore, an unrecognised demand to develop a common system and supporting business process, which had sufficient flexibility to provide good management information, common measures and a 'single version of the truth'.

The PIMMS system

The principle objective of the project was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of people and process management, through the provision of an enhanced productivity and performance-management reporting tool.

About five years ago, the 'Productivity Improvement Measurement and Management System' (PIMMS) was introduced in a basic form - using a Microsoft Access database on standalone PCs at seven sites. At that time it was being used by 1,400 staff and proved to be a major success, demonstrating that there were considerable benefits from using such a system. However, further expansion was restricted by its stand-alone nature.

Over the past 18 months, PIMMS has been developed using the Group's intranet system as a delivery channel and is now available to around 14,000 staff in 80 separate locations. With further expansion planned to cover all relevant Manufacturing units, the total number of people using PIMMS could soon reach 18,000. It is also being considered for use in RBS Group's UK branch network and other processing environments.

Based on the operational management principle that you can't manage effectively unless you measure what you are doing, PIMMS is designed as a capacity planning and operations-management system, which brings the following disciplines into one user- friendly package:

Employee rosters and absences;

Employee skills;

Employee efficiency;

Work volumes - received, completed and work-in-progress;

Consistent process-measurement times using 'predetermined administrative-data system' (PADS) professional standards;

Predictive volume ...