Operations is the delivery mechanism of the bank, providing the processing infrastructure that ensures execution of the product and service promise. It is the engine driving the back-office work by clearing transactions, reconciling balances, executing on transfers, tackling execution anomalies and dealing with peaks and valleys of demand. That engine depends on input from the frontline functions of the business—Branch Network, Sales, Marketing and Finance.
Traditional barriers to effective performance management in Operations include:
- The operational backend can't see where it's going without the frontline's vision.
- Process bottlenecks and downtime.
- In a fast-paced, increasingly specialized economy, cost averages disguise cost reality.
For Operations to win at the margins, every day and in every process step, it must balance the need to reduce costs while staying agile enough to respond to new customer and product demands. The Performance Manager for Banking offers ways Operations can use IBM Cognos software to lead five core areas of the bank's decision-making:
- Procurement: Ensuring timely and cost-effective input of resources and capacity.
- Capacity and resource scheduling: Generating timely output in the face of uncertain demand, complicated processes and variances in input.
- Network and logistics: Achieving efficient logistic and network execution.
- Cost and quality management: Balancing the need to reduce costs with the equal requirement to deliver quality output.
- Process efficiency: Designing a process to monitor and analyze performance benchmarks to find opportunities for greater efficiency.
