The New England Bank provides a full line of retail and commercial products and services for customers in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.

As this New England bank became a $26 billion dollar banking and financial services company, it found that its "Pay for Performance" plan to reward employees was consuming more branch manager hours as the company grew. Requiring nearly three days each quarter from each of the company's 350 branch managers, the system had become too labor intensive to continue. The time to manage the system increased, and there was a delay between an employee's outstanding work and the time of the bonus payment. The company wanted to reduce management time spent on the system and reward its soon-to-be 10,000 employees faster. The company turned to CTE to devise a technology solution to solve its business challenge.

The existing system presented challenges to managers, employees, and the finance department. Managers were spending an excessive amount of time working with what had become a cumbersome program and the manual nature of it created errors, which consumed even more time to be corrected. There were long delays between performance and reward, making it more difficult for employees to understand how they could improve their performance. Finally, the finance department had no means to forecast and plan for these payments, making expense management difficult.

The company participated in a CTE’s Cambridge Executive Workshop (CEW), during which they developed a prototype solution to address the performance incentive system. A typical CEW brings together executives, managers, end users, and other stakeholders to identify innovative ideas and quickly implement them as solutions.

During the CEW, six executives and operations staff from the bank worked with CTE experts to identify the processes that could be improved. They then collaborated during the fast-paced, three-week CEW to evolve a solution to pay employees for performance in a timely way and make the process truly automated, so that fewer employee hours would be consumed in administering the program.

Through the CEW, the company was able to:

• Develop an architecture for a flexible technology solution;
  
• Create a custom prototype of the solution to reduce the time for pay bonuses;
  
• Provide a framework for Rapid Application Development (RAD);
  
• Develop a deployment roadmap to quickly capture maximum business benefits and implement the system.

Benefits

The new centralized, automated system would provide real-time reports for branch managers, reducing the number of days they spend managing the performance incentive program by nearly 3000, thus giving each branch manager nearly 70 hours more per year to devote to customer service and generate additional revenues.

For employees, the time for pay bonuses is reduced from six to four weeks to create a clearer connection for employees between performance and reward.

Further, this solution would make the finance department an active participant in the process, providing accurate and timely financial forecasts for the program, so that expense management can be eased.