CITIBANK & RBS

Citibank & RBS

Citibank & RBS

Introduction

The firms selected from financial service sector are Citibank and Royal Bank of Sctoland (RBS). Undoubtedly, both these banks managed their resources successfully. Forecasting is one aspect of planning capacity. Its four functions are marketing, operations, HRM and finance. Citibank and RBS took measures according to these functions in order to plan its capacity. Take the Manufacturing Division and Retail Division (one of the customer-facing divisions) for example. Firstly, CitiBank & RBS used psychometric tests to draw out appropriate staff who were interested in people for 'front office' branches, and those who were interested in processes and systems for 'backroom' Manufacturing Divisions.

Analysis of Strategies

We can deduce that, Citibank's reengineering of its call centre process was a runaway success. After an 8 month research period weighing up the benefits of Sydney against several other cities in the Asia/Pacific region, the fact that Citicorp committed a substantial seven figure investment in the Sydney call centre proves that senior management was backing the reengineering effort.

It can be critically said that Citibank have come a long way in a short time. The commitment to effective change remains the same as the arsenal of tools and approaches expands. If Citibank repeats its BPR successes then they will achieve their goals and more in the future. By constantly identifying processed to reengineer, Citibank is America's largest bank in total assets, enjoys the largest global presence of any bank, with offices in more than 93 countries. We can say that Citibank's project structure is well defined with continuous improvement as the final agenda to provide performance measurement, fine tune new processes and to adopt Total Quality Management.

Based on our analysis, getting people to accept the idea that their work lives and their jobs will undergo radical change, which may sound merciless, is not a war won in a single battle. We deduce that business process reengineering is more of an educational and communication campaign that runs from the reengineering's initiation to its wrapping up. It is more of a selling job that Citibank did quite well, that begins with the realisation that things cannot remain the way they are and that reengineering is required. Most importantly BPR does not wind up until after the redesigned processed have been certified to run up to expectation to produce dramatic improvements.

In our judgment, the call centre in Sydney is a fine example how Citibank merged the right people with the right technology. Citibank most probably used an advanced PABX system capable of routing a high volume of incoming calls to its customer service representatives. By reengineering its employees' job functions, the Sydney centre can arrange replacement travellers' cheques anywhere in the world with one phone call in the customer's own language. The Sydney staff communicates with them in their own language, organise replacement cheques and importantly direct the call accurately using an information system, to the cheque issuing city overseas.

RBS made great effort to plan capacity in new operating processes and outputs ...