At Bank of America, I was an Operations Team Lead for the Los Angeles Fulfillment Operations department. We fulfilled statements, items and research inquires for our customers. Our customers included internal associates, consumers, and legal and government entities. This involved working with many bank products such as, checking, savings, certificate of deposits, individual retirement accounts, brokerage accounts and credit cards accounts. With a team of twenty-five associates, we would fulfill an average of three thousand request, which would generate approximately thirty thousand deliverables. Fulfillment Operation would extensively use planning, organization, leading and controlling in its operations.
Much of the fulfillment would be processed through our automated channel if there were no issues involved. When we would get these exceptions, we would push these requests to our manual workflow. Our associates would quality check the work to verify all documents were generated and we would prevent privacy breaches. The department operated with a service level agreement (SLA) of one day.
We would emphasize our ultimate goal in our planning stage. The main goal for Fulfillment Operations was to meet our one-day service level agreement and utilize capacity effectively. We would do this by assigning volumes appropriately among the associates and offer overtime when necessary. Additionally, we would work with our sister site in Utica, New York to load level volumes to utilized department capacity accordingly. This was planned by having a capacity call at day 0 by discussing the volume forecast and load leveling opportunities. The next morning on day 1, we reconvened and discuss load-leveling adjustments, if necessary. According to Huang, Wand & Ho (2013), when demand is uncertain and expected to be higher than capacity, the options we have is to increase production, utilize other production channels, overtime or subcontract. In Fulfillment Operations, we would utilize other production channel firstly. Secondly, we would utilized overtime. Due to the sensitivity of the documents, we do not subcontract. To increase the production of an employee was not an option as we already calculated their expected production rates. However, Gabris & Giles (1983), have suggest that and employee can increase production rates if an incentive was offered. Unfortunately, Bank of America did have these type of incentive programs available. Organizing our volumes with capacity was a daily routine that was achieved though load leveling. …show more content…
Load leveling can be the move of automated or manual volumes to either Utica or Los Angeles for capacity reasons. We would also utilize load leveling when we have a technical issue that prevents one site from fulfilling the work. Such issue can be a faulty printer, data server or weather that interrupted electrical service. At the end of the day, we would discuss evaluate the capacity to determine if the load leveling was utilized effectively. Meeting the service level agreement was the ultimate goal and we would have to allocate associates appropriately. The banking industry has placed a renewed emphasis on automation through information technology (Post, 1995). At Bank of America there an emphasis on information technology. According to Post (1995), larger banks will shows interest in information technology whereas smaller bank would have the least interest. As the demand of the market increases, with the diversity of banking products, the focus of information technology on banking will only increase to meet the demand (Post, 1995). Fulfillment Operations served many products and each would increase volumes. To mitigate, we would rely on information technology solutions, such as automation. However, some products could not be processed though automation. We have bank products such as certificate of deposits, individual retirement accounts and trust accounts that can only be fulfilled manually. These products were unable to be fulfilled through our automation and this effected our production and capacity. The department would need to utilize more associates and take more time but these volumes were not as significant as automation work. In other words, the manual work took more time but did not created enough output. This is important because capacity was based on output. Even though this manual process had the same service level agreement as our automated process, we would emphasize on our automation because it would be more reflective in our capacity. Once our automation
Much of the fulfillment would be processed through our automated channel if there were no issues involved. When we would get these exceptions, we would push these requests to our manual workflow. Our associates would quality check the work to verify all documents were generated and we would prevent privacy breaches. The department operated with a service level agreement (SLA) of one day.
We would emphasize our ultimate goal in our planning stage. The main goal for Fulfillment Operations was to meet our one-day service level agreement and utilize capacity effectively. We would do this by assigning volumes appropriately among the associates and offer overtime when necessary. Additionally, we would work with our sister site in Utica, New York to load level volumes to utilized department capacity accordingly. This was planned by having a capacity call at day 0 by discussing the volume forecast and load leveling opportunities. The next morning on day 1, we reconvened and discuss load-leveling adjustments, if necessary. According to Huang, Wand & Ho (2013), when demand is uncertain and expected to be higher than capacity, the options we have is to increase production, utilize other production channels, overtime or subcontract. In Fulfillment Operations, we would utilize other production channel firstly. Secondly, we would utilized overtime. Due to the sensitivity of the documents, we do not subcontract. To increase the production of an employee was not an option as we already calculated their expected production rates. However, Gabris & Giles (1983), have suggest that and employee can increase production rates if an incentive was offered. Unfortunately, Bank of America did have these type of incentive programs available. Organizing our volumes with capacity was a daily routine that was achieved though load leveling. …show more content…
Load leveling can be the move of automated or manual volumes to either Utica or Los Angeles for capacity reasons. We would also utilize load leveling when we have a technical issue that prevents one site from fulfilling the work. Such issue can be a faulty printer, data server or weather that interrupted electrical service. At the end of the day, we would discuss evaluate the capacity to determine if the load leveling was utilized effectively. Meeting the service level agreement was the ultimate goal and we would have to allocate associates appropriately. The banking industry has placed a renewed emphasis on automation through information technology (Post, 1995). At Bank of America there an emphasis on information technology. According to Post (1995), larger banks will shows interest in information technology whereas smaller bank would have the least interest. As the demand of the market increases, with the diversity of banking products, the focus of information technology on banking will only increase to meet the demand (Post, 1995). Fulfillment Operations served many products and each would increase volumes. To mitigate, we would rely on information technology solutions, such as automation. However, some products could not be processed though automation. We have bank products such as certificate of deposits, individual retirement accounts and trust accounts that can only be fulfilled manually. These products were unable to be fulfilled through our automation and this effected our production and capacity. The department would need to utilize more associates and take more time but these volumes were not as significant as automation work. In other words, the manual work took more time but did not created enough output. This is important because capacity was based on output. Even though this manual process had the same service level agreement as our automated process, we would emphasize on our automation because it would be more reflective in our capacity. Once our automation