Case Study Of ABN AMRO Clearing

1.6 Structure of the research
Before we go any further and dive deep into the research, its good idea to briefly look at the structure of the research. We will start with problem analysis, where we would highlight the management problem, research objective, and conceptual model. Then we would move to literature research, and study various forecasting methods, and how can we go about choosing the forecasting methods. Then we would move to methodology. Here we would highlight the challenges and depending on those challenges we would select few forecasting methods from the discussed methods. After that, we move on to data acquisition and data analysis, where we would gather the historical data, will do statistical analysis, and build a forecasting
Executives and operating managers have to deal with constant challenge of maintaining a fine balance between service level and operating cost (of which labor cost is usually a big part). Though, many workforce management software are available in the market, but they are as good as the input that we feed into the system. The real challenge in to get more insights into behavior of supply and demand, and various factors that affect supply and demand. Since, I will be talking about ABN AMRO Clearing operations, let's consider demand as various type of activities that people have to perform daily. For instance, handling External deadlines, Ex-dates, & Pay-dates; attending meetings, & trainings, entertaining urgent client request, mailbox checking, etc. Most of the terms that we use here are specific to clearing functions of banks (and ABN AMRO). For the sake of simplicity, let us call them events. On the supply side, we have workforce, i.e. the number of available employees. If proper planning is not done, and there is mismatch between supply and demand then there are consequences, either in terms of decreased service level or in terms of idle capacity of employees. A fine balance has to be maintained between achieving the desired service level and proper utilization of the
availability of work force), we also need to take into account the factors such as proper training, leaves/vacations, illness, knowledge and skill level of worker etc. It is not just the number of employees that counts, but how effective they are in fulfilling the demand (i.e. performing their tasks). Thus, for instance, if we have 10 employees, but their knowledge level is just 50%, it is like effectively having only 5 employees. Similarly, if we have 10 employees but they are absent (either due to sickness, leave, or vacation) 30% of the time, it is like effectively having only 7 employees. Thus, it is very important to measure these factors, while doing the planning on the supply side. The idea is to achieve a healthy balance between achieving the desired service levels for clients and at the same time ensure that, cost of achieving this service level, does not goes over the