The implementation has been an enabler in helping Geoban UK deliver cumulative savings in excess of £5m over the last three years.

Geoban UK covers all operational activities for Santander UK and all its subsidiaries, including account opening, loan or credit card applications, national or international payments and/or transfers, and servicing customer accounts for the bank’s retail, corporate, investment, cards, insurance and private banking customers. To manage these diverse and large-scale operations Geoban UK has established Centers of Excellence that provide services for the Santander UK entities.

The Geoban UK culture is dynamic, fast-paced and constantly evolving; embracing the Simple, Personal and Fair Values it extols for customers, employees and shareholders alike. Both the culture and metrics are focused on the end-to-end customer journey, operating in a continuously improving environment and by challenging themselves to constantly deliver 1% marginal gains in everything they do.

The Command Centre supports all operational teams with the following services: MI, Planning/Forecasting, eg work manager® support and performance planning for 10 sites supporting over 3000+ staff members. Through regular engagement with the operational teams all plans are reviewed and maintained to enable successful execution to meet targets around quality, control and productivity.

Jas Narang – Director, Governance, Control & Finance, stated: “eg was engaged to optimise the effective use of resources within the operational teams. This involved a roll-out of the back office workforce optimisation solution to a total user base of 2,200+ people. This was supported by an operational management training framework, based on the eg principles of operational management®,”

“For me, the eg work manager® toolkit, along with our philosophy of using the data from it to drive business decisions, is a key ingredient to Geoban UK’s roaring success in its cultural transformation journey over the last 2-3 years in particular. Without eg work manager® and its principles, combined with the sterling effort of the Command Centre team, I doubt that Geoban UK would ever be recognised as the benchmark operation unit globally across the Group as is the case today!”

An original pilot project had proved that the business could be optimised if real-time intra-day work management functionality were to be implemented. Geoban UK had historically used a basic data capture tool and had monthly planning models in place for some business areas within Geoban, but not 100% coverage and not at daily or intraday levels. MI delivery was also part of a different team.

Following the initial implementation of the eg operational intelligence® software suite, the MI team joined the Command Centre unit and planning models were put in place with 100% coverage across Geoban UK. Using the eg principles of operational management® training framework, eg worked with Geoban to create an in-house “Geoban Principles” framework to take into account the specific culture, policies and requirements of Geoban.

In the second phase, following implementation of the software, the Command Centre had fully embraced the tool and were delivering the ‘Flat Back Office’ concept i.e. working with a similar number of resources, irrespective of peaks in transactional volume flowing through to the operational back office teams.

This was done using eg work manager® through proactively improving quality, control and productivity.

Elizabeth Gooch, CEO, eg solutions, concluded: “There is no doubt that Geoban UK consistently strive to achieve higher levels of operational performance year on year. They leave no stone unturned in their pursuit to deliver a more effective and efficient service to their range of customers and stakeholders. They have set the excellence bar high and continue to raise it.”