The challenge
A regional bank with 420,000 personal and business customers ran its mortgage servicing and payments operations from two sites, with 310 staff between them. Work arrived unevenly, peaked at month end and was allocated by whoever had capacity that morning.
By the time the bank's operations director contacted us, the backlog of customer requests stood at eleven working days. Overtime had become routine, costing more than £900,000 a year, and two attempts to reduce the backlog with temporary staff had cleared it briefly before it returned. Customers chased, and every chase added more work.
The bank wanted to clear the backlog for good and to understand what capacity it actually needed.
What we did
We worked with the bank for six months, starting in one team at each site and then extending the approach across both.
First, we measured demand. For four weeks, every piece of work was logged by type, arrival time and handling time. It showed that 22% of the work was failure demand, mostly customers chasing requests already in the backlog, and that month-end peaks were predictable to within a few per cent. Two routine tasks that had always been done at month end could safely move earlier, which took the top off the peak.
Second, we built a simple capacity plan. A spreadsheet model, owned by the bank's planning team, now forecasts each week's demand by work type and compares it with the hours available. Managers can see a shortfall coming two weeks ahead instead of on the day.
Third, we introduced standard work and daily routines. Teams agreed one standard method for each of the twenty most common tasks and wrote it down. Each team now starts the day with a ten-minute huddle at a planning board to agree priorities and flag problems, and team leaders spend an hour a day coaching at desks.
Fourth, with the bank's technology team, we removed the most wasteful re-keying. Three small automations, built on tools the bank already licensed, took information from customer forms straight into the servicing system.
We trained 24 team leaders and managers to run the routines themselves, and handed over the planning model with written guidance.
The result
Within four months the backlog was cleared and has stayed below two days since. After a full year, the bank reported:
23%
more work completed per hour worked, measured across both sites
Under 2
working days of backlog, down from eleven
£640,000
a year less spent on overtime
Chasing calls fell with the backlog. Around 40 roles were released through normal staff turnover and moved into customer-facing teams. There were no redundancies.
“We had always tried to solve this with more people. The answer was knowing what was coming and agreeing how to do it.”
Head of Operations, the bank
