- PROCESS REDESIGN
- AUTOMATION
- RPA
Redesign, improvement and automation of operational processes for Geoban (Banco Santander).
Cost savings
It went from making temporary contracts for 300 people in specific periods of the year to being able to carry out the operation with a smaller and more stable workforce.International Project
Portugal, England and PolandEfficiency and productivity
It all started with a call…
It all started with a call one Friday afternoon from one of our contacts at Geoban. They had a big problem. Every year they had several peaks of work over the year, forcing them to hire around 300 people, train them for two months, have them working for another three, and then fire them. This was extremely expensive, as the entire training process had to be repeated during each campaign.
The following week, a Babel team travelled to Lisbon to do a proof of concept by automating a small web process using a test automation tool. They thought it could work... and that's where it all started.
Three months to the start of the campaign
The goal was to redesign the operational processes connected with the opening of CASH ISA accounts in the UK, along with automation allowing for a small number of people to be recruited, which was a far cry from the previous three hundred a year. The peak in operations would be reached in early March, so we had less than three months to obtain results.
Process analysis and redesign
The work of the operators essentially consisted of registering the data required to create and close customer accounts in different applications of the Banco Santander website.
Our first task was to conduct a detailed study of those processes, clearly identifying which tasks could be automated, measuring operator times to detect which tasks could yield the highest savings, or which made the greatest number of manual errors. Once this study was complete, a proposal was made to redesign the processes, which were then built once approved.
Instead of having operators fill in data on the portals, the website was fed by a spreadsheet and the tool simulated an operator. An attempt was also made to improve the organisation by providing support in order to make it as simple as possible to reprocess incorrect cases or to obtain quality KPIs by incorporating macros and reports developed in the spreadsheet into the process.
Exponential reduction in times in management operations
The project was a great success. The average time to register was around eight minutes for an operator. Following the implementation of the new one-post process, around 300 records per hour could be created. The goals set at the beginning of the project were met and exceeded.
Such was the success that even before the project was completed they suggested that we would reinforce the team once the first phase had ended in order to automate processes in locations other than Lisbon. Specifically in Gdynia (Poland), and in London and Bradford (UK).
We were asked to work with Geoban again on several occasions after these initial phases.
