How The Royal Bank of Scotland has utilized process documentation to construct a sustainable knowledge based repository.

Back at the turn of the Century, The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) completed one of the most successful takeovers in corporate history. From that point Corporate Modeler has been used to document the processes of the Manufacturing division employing 25,000 staff in 80 locations across the UK providing technology, high volume processing and specialist services to the customer-facing divisions and group functions.

Manufacturing handle more than one and a half million customer calls each week, process 12 million changes to customers standing orders and direct debits every year, and operate the UK’s largest ATM network.

With the integration of the Royal Bank and NatWest IT systems in 2002, there was a requirement to re-train NatWest staff on the RBS IT platform. Out of this was born a project to fully document the processes as a training aid to 4,000+ staff and an on-going requirement for a sustainable knowledge repository to which staff could easily refer for guidance.

Having successfully created a suite of three dimensional flowcharts known as On-line Process Diagrams (OPDs) using Process Dynamics, the organization then went onto ensure they did not become ‘shelfware’ but were instead used as the foundation on which its process management and continuous improvement initiatives were built.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has created a suite of consistent and effective process documentation published over the Bank’s Intranet using Corporate Publisher covering 5,000 processes by way of 9,300 diagrams. The benefits of managing process documentation in this way has been recognized both internally and externally leading to the roll out of OPD documentation into other divisions of the Bank, the elimination of paper based manuals and recognition in numerous business competitions. The total OPD audience is now in the region of 35,000 member of staff.