Lean for Banks: Improving Quality, Productivity, and Morale in Financial Offices

Most banking institutions suffer from numerous inefficiencies, such as poor planning; inadequate coordination and communication; ineffective processes, tools, and workflow; and excessive bureaucracy. Lean for Banks describes in easy language how to use Lean and Six Sigma management practices to significantly improve the efficiency of bank operations.

This book shows how to use Lean and Six Sigma management practices to improve the normal daily work in a bank, typically executed in the so-called "back offices." This work involves about 90 percent of bank employees and generates 90 percent of costs. Lean for Banks explains how to organize bank operations better, increase work productivity and quality by working smarter and not harder, make fewer mistakes and decrease rework, and elevate jobs from mundane and repetitive to creative and pleasantly challenging. Most importantly, it shows how to increase the satisfaction of bank customers and in turn enhance bank competitiveness and market share.

Lean for Banks is intended for all levels of bank employees: back-office workers, first-level supervisors, middle- and higher-level managers, and corporate executives. It is also intended for all levels of students at schools that teach banking skills―short courses intended for tellers, college courses in advanced banking operations, and continuing education for bank managers and line employees. This book is an entry-level text on Lean and should give readers enough understanding to prepare them for active participation in Lean deployment activities.

Bohdan W. Oppenheim, PhD has been a professor of systems engineering at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles since 1983. He is a recognized global leader in Lean systems engineering and author of an influential book titled Lean for Systems Engineering with Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering. Dr. Oppenheim co-led a team of 15 experts supported by a community of 150 practitioners to develop the best Lean-inspired practices for managing complex engineering programs. For this work he received the Shingo Award, the highest honor in the field of operational excellence, INCOSE‘s Best Product Award, and two smaller awards. This work was later expanded into a joint project of the Project Management Institute (PMI), International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) led by a team based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on which Oppenheim served as key contributor. The result was a second book on Lean-inspired best practices for managing engineering programs, The Guide to Lean Enablers for Managing Engineering Programs for which the team was honored with a Shingo Award (the second for Oppenheim). Dr. Oppenheim is the founder and co-leader of the INCOSE Lean Systems Engineering Working Group, the organization‘s largest working group involving more than 200 members. He also directed Loyola Marymount University‘s US Department of Energy Industrial Assessment Center. In this capacity, he advised 125 Southern California companies of all sizes and types on Lean productivity matters. With S. Rubin, Dr. Oppenheim designed Aerospace Corporation‘s POGO simulator for liquid rockets used by NASA and private industry. He consulted for Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Airbus, EADS, Telekomunikacja Polska, Mars, Medtronics, the US Coast Guard and the US Air Force, Thales, TRW, and 50 other firms and governmental institutions in the United States and Europe. Dr. Oppenheim is or was a member of INCOSE, LAI EdNet,