Otimização da carga operativa das sucursais do ActivoBank

Abstract

Operational efficiency is an ever-increasing decisive factor in several organizations’ strategies, such as banking, which has been pointing out this topic as one of the main priorities to take into consideration. The rise of new market players poses a great threat to this sector, and a quick response from the banking institutions is in order. But how should banks react to this threat? Firstly, it is necessary to look back into the strategy which the organization wishes to adopt. Besides simplifying their product portfolio, banks must simplify their processes, as to increase flexibility and agility in responding to the market’s fast changes. This being said, it’s crucial to review operational procedures, find eventual points of inefficiency and be able to adapt the operations to the strategic goals that are set. This is precisely where this document is focused on, since three operational procedures, currently being enforced in ActivoBank’s branch offices, but common to the whole banking sector, are analyzed. This analysis had as its main goal to optimize the workflow of ActivoBank’s commercial network, through the auditing of three processes: opening a bank account, self-banking or ATM withdrawals and returned accounts. In order to achieve this study, a search for operational efficiency in services-related literature was conducted, specifically in the retail banking sector. Following the theoretical context, a documental analysis and observation of the three aforementioned processes was elaborated in ActivoBank’s branch offices, in order to identify any operational bottlenecks, which may have had direct impact in the bank’s operational efficiency. In a second stage, a few improvement suggestions were presented, aiming to optimize the organization’s retail network’s workflow. It should be noted that, throughout the whole analysis, not only the constraints of the workflow itself have been taken into consideration, but also the ones affecting the customer’s experience, since in the services area, we cannot focus on efficiency alone, as there must be a balance between it and the consumer’s satisfaction. The obtained conclusions allowed us to conclude that the impact of identified bottlenecks in the branch offices’ workflow was significant and, furthermore, we can state that the analysed processes have also had a high impact on the customer’s experience, particularly in the perception of ActivoBank’s service quality.

Date of Award	12 Jul 2016
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rita Ribeiro (Supervisor) & Rita Ribeiro (Co-Supervisor)