Transaction Processing edition - November 2003
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New bonus scheme for TP
In this month’s edition you'll see the details of how the new TP PO/PA bonus scheme will
work.
I'm sure you will welcome the opportunity to actually influence the amount of bonus you
receive and be rewarded for the level of work you do on a day to day basis.
Allan Leighton to reschedule visit
Obviously it was a disappointment for both TP and the Leadership Excellence training course
(which a number of our people were attending), that at the last minute Allan Leighton had to
cancel his visit. After having spoken with Allan's office they confirmed that Allan was also
disappointed, but there was an urgent demand for his presence in London, which he could
not avoid.
Allan has stated we are top of his list for an open forum the next time he is in the area, but
due to a very busy schedule, a date has not yet been confirmed. As soon as we know we will
arrange. They have however given us a note of warning, this may be at short notice — so
keep watching this space.
In the meantime we are holding an open forum at 2.30pm on 20 November, where our
Finance Director Peter Corbett (and the line manager to TP) will give us an update on how
the Business is doing, followed by an open question and answer session. Peter's previous
forum was extremely well received by those who attended and I'd encourage everyone who.
can make it to attend.
Update on Industrial Action
As you will recently have heard both in the national press and via our own business
communications, the unofficial postal industrial action is now resolved and the backlog of
mail has started to be cleared. This is excellent news. The impact upon TP has been
relatively minor except for the fact that we have been getting the branch pouches late and
cash centre supporting documents have also not been received.
However the Data Preparation teams have managed to continue to meet all their targets by
putting in extra effort, so well done and thank you to you all.
IMPACT
You will see on page 5 a very interesting article by Julie Pope on the IMPACT programme
and I recommend that you read this. The changes this will bring to us in TP are radical and
therefore we are working very closely with the programme team to ensure we have input at
all stages and understand the effect upon us. It is great news for us that both Julie Pope and
Ann Clarke will continue to have a role as part of the programme team, in liaising with TP
during the development and implementation of the changes.
Finally you will have heard the good news of the permanent appointment of Alison Bolsover
to the Operations Manager role and I’m sure you will join me in wishing Alison every success
on her promotion.
Vicky Noble - Head of Transaction Processing
A bonus for POs and PAs
In the October edition of TP Focus we promised to communicate the outline of the proposed
new TP PO/PA bonus scheme, which we have been developing in liaison with the CWU.
The scheme, which will depend on the unit's performance against target, will be payable for
achieving the following:
e Local tier - a possible payment of two x £50 each quarter for achieving the two
real unit labour cost (RULC) targets — these relate to how quickly and efficiently
we complete our work.
e A locally based possible annual payment of £120 for achievement of the day
sales outstanding (DSO) target — this is a measure of how long, on average, it
takes a debt to be settled.
e Anationally based possible payment of £150 is attached to the national tier — this
reinforces the message that returning Post Office Ltd to profitability is a key
requirement
There is also a ‘gain share’ element of the scheme, which means that if both RULC targets
have been met, then POs and PAs will be eligible to receive a share of the savings made
over and above targets.
Workshops will be held for team leaders to explain all the details of the scheme to them.
They will then communicate this to you via your Work Time Leaming and Listening sessions.
Mandy Jepson - TP Planning Manager —
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Christmas arrangements
In order to ensure consistency across Transaction Processing and Post Office Ltd as a whole,
the following must be followed over the Christmas and New Year period:
Attendance times
Attendance should be as normal each day with the following exceptions:
Christmas Eve, 24 December - directly managed branches will work until 12.30pm on
Christmas Eve, therefore the finishing time for Transaction Processing staff is the same.
Christmas Day and Boxing Day - 25 and 26 December Bank Holidays.
Saturday 27 December - Normal working day for those scheduled to attend.
New Years Eve, 31 December - directly managed branches will work until 4pm on New
Years Eve, therefore the finishing time for Transaction Processing staff is the same.
New Years Day, 1 January - Bank Holiday
Annual leave
Members of staff taking Christmas Eve off as annual leave should note that this will be
recorded as a full days annual leave. Likewise, annual leave taken on New Years Eve will
count as a full day's leave.
Christmas lunches
Normal flexi rules will apply, however operational cover must be maintained so that targets
are achieved.
Please note that flexi carry over (credit/debit) will remain at the normal 11 hours.
Dress code
Casual dress code will be permitted on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. Anyone who has
meetings with customers, suppliers and other external contacts on these days should wear
business dress.
David Skipworth — Data Preparation Manager
Christmas Quiz 2003
Fill in the missing word...John, Paul, George and............?
If you've correctly answered ‘Ringo’ then you're in with an excellent chance of winning the
Christmas quiz.
Over the last two years myself and Paul Uden from Cash Management have set a Christmas
quiz across Transaction Processing and Cash Management which has raised some £350 for
charity. This year in a ‘Eurovision’ style approach, we shall broadcast the quiz simultaneously
across Transaction Processing, Cash Management and Network Support. The format is
simple:
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- Get your team together (max six players) and give it a name. Preferably one which doesn't
easily identify the team members - you just might come last!
- Nominate one person in your team who has access to e mail
- Pay at least a pound per person to Julie Boler for people in Chesterfield, Nicola Watson for
Dearne and Dave Ireland for people in London, by 3 December.
- Each day (for the next 10 working days) starting Monday 8 December you should send a
team rep to pick up a quiz sheet.
Rules
On the first day (Monday 8 December) the nominated team rep. will receive a copy of the
quiz rules via e mail - these rules serve two purposes, firstly to tell you how the quiz works
and secondly to enable you to argue with the judges on ridiculous points of detail. The
nominated team reps will also receive the first day's quiz via e mail.
The following day the answers and a league table of who is winning will be e mailed to the
team rep.
The highest scoring team in each location on Friday 19 December gets to keep a third of all
the money, well for a short while anyway, until it goes off to their nominated charity.
Copies of the quiz are then sold so you can impress the relatives on Boxing Day - proceeds
from this will go to the rock bottom team to give to their favourite charity.
Good Luck.
Steve Jakeman and Paul Uden
NB If you answered Bingo, Bongo or Bengo to the first question you might be better spending
your pound on satsumas.
How is the new structure bedding in.......?
In Debt Recovery we are, even at this early stage, conducting a review of the first reminder
phone call and disputes process.
The effectiveness of the disputes process is particularly crucial to reducing the age of debt.
This is because once a postmaster has raised an issue or a dispute with us -the ball is in our
court (or to use another analogy -the monkey is on our back) to reply to his query. We have
identified some gaps already, particularly the lack of training available and deployed for the
disputes duties. Dave Hardie and I are working on this with all concerned.
A full action plan will be developed once the review is completed.
You will have read in other communications about the merger of the Agents Debt Teams 3
and 4. This is going well thanks to the hard work of Dave Hardie, Carol King, Joanne Jackson
and the team members in AD3 and 4.
Debt recovery focus
Currently our overall focus in debt recovery is on:
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e Introducing a revised process for how we manage error notices for the multiple
partners (the Co-op, etc who own many branches) to ensure our chase up is more
effective. Shirley Foster and members of her team have put in a lot of detailed work
in a short space of time for this, which is greatly appreciated by our retail line
colleagues and myself.
« Our initiative on taking amounts owed from remuneration — as a last resort only.
I will be able to give more information on both of the above in next month’s Focus.
In general, not only are we ‘bedding in’ the new teams but introducing new initiatives as well.
And finally, we have positive results in Agents Debt Team 1, Bev McNeil’s team, from the
deployment of the OPTIP extract and also improved links with Security and Investigations.
Overall then some areas of improvement that we are working on and some exciting
challenges with the new initiatives, all of which is aimed at one thing — reducing the age of
debt.
Jennifer Robson - Debt Recovery Manager
Simpler systems in the pipeline
“Changing the way our systems help us do business, to dramatically simplify the job at the
counter and in the back office” — this is one of the promises our IT Director Alan Barrie has
made which will impact on branches and all of us in TP.
Branches can expect a rationalisation of accounting systems, including the ultimate removal
of the cash account in a programme of changes called IMPACT (IMProved ACcounTing).
You may have heard this referred to as the ‘End to End Simplification of Accounts’
programme.
So what is the IMPACT programme?
The Business has had a long-standing desire to improve the end-to-end branch accounting
processes and it is also recognised there is a need to align to industry standards of
accounting.
The scope of the programme includes:
1. Implementing new business processes in the areas of cash and funds management,
branch control, accounting, settlement, reconciliation and debt recovery.
2. Improving reference data systems and processes.
3. Improving speed and accessibility of management information.
4. Changing our systems, both at the counter (Horizon) and in our support functions
(Transaction Processing and Finance).
The programme is planned to be delivered in three phases:
e Cash and Funds Management — September 2004
e Reference Data and Management Information - December 2004
e Accounting — March 2005
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What does this mean for TP?
The main areas of impact are:
« Removal of the cash account
¢ Introduction of a new ‘SAP’ accounting system — called POL FS (Post Office Ltd
Financial System)
e — Introduction of new verification processes
e — Introduction of debt recovery case management
e De-commissioning of OPTIP, CBDB and some other smaller systems currently used
by TP
To enable all this to happen by March 2005 there will obviously be a need for awareness,
training and changes to existing processes to enable us to deal with these major challenges.
Watch this space
So far, numerous awareness sessions have been held for managers within TP and Cash
Management and several managers have already been involved in inputting to business
requirements. Over the next few months more involvement will be required from the affected
teams.
We are also in the process of planning further communication and awareness activities, so
watch this space.
Julie Pope - Business Analyst =.
Win yourself £100?
Don’t forget you or your team have the opportunity to win £100 in vouchers simply by telling
us how you are demonstrating our business values.
You'll see on page five of People Focus Post Office®® business values
examples of how three branches are living
the values and winning themselves £100.
Customers matter most
Treat people with respect
Act with honesty
Expect more and get more
Simple and straight forward
Commercial and profitable
Now it is your turn to show what you are
doing — look through the list of values and
tell us which ones you put into practice,
and how.
eeceee
Send your entries via e mail to Fay
Healey.
How do you put them into practice?
Kevin Cooper — Internal Communications Team —;
Steve’s location
As from this month I'm changing the balance of my working week to:
- Two days in Dearne/Hemel Hempstead (provisionally Wed/Thurs)
- Three days in Transaction Processing Chesterfield.
This is a temporary measure probably until the end of January, as the current focus needs to
be on achieving headcount reductions within Transaction Processing and Hemel. There are
no changes in my reporting line which is still to Ruth Holleran.
Steve Jakeman — HR Efficiency/Project Manager —
Special agents?
I had, in a previous article, said that I would provide practical information of how agency staff
are used to the advantage of the Business and our own staff.
Having gone through significant changes in the past six months and as a consequence
having dramatically reduced the level of agency staff being employed on a day to day basis
with the Data Processing area, we now are finding that we are being asked by exception
teams to provide staff in order to cover long term sick absence, or support in the eradication
of any backlogs of work.
If we cannot provide the staff the impact would be that the exception teams would
increasingly have to rely on overtime as the only means of achieving its work, or Data
Preparation would fail to process documents in time, thereby creating more exceptions than
necessary.
Real example
In week 29 within Data Preparation we had:
Two staff loaned to other teams, two staff away on courses, three staff on long term sick and
nine staff on annual leave.
We also have to deal with the backlog of paper at Hipper Street, built up over time, which
now requires destroying.
No doubt on your own teams you know where there are either gaps or other means of
covering work.
The net result is that within Data Preparation we have to employ 16 agency staff to maintain
our work processing and avoid creating exceptions.
Flexibility
So you can see that without the flexibility of agency staff we would potentially have a serious
problem in meeting the work targets and would be unable to provide accurate settlements
and management information to our clients.
The use of agency staff though is under constant review and Data Preparation team leaders
are looking at their requirements weekly, in order to make sure that we only use agency staff
where it is demonstrated they add real value to our processes.
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What a release
The latest enhancement to Horizon (known as ‘S50') is about to go live. Starting with the
addition of E-Top Up functionality on 13 November. This release will also include an
enhancement of the current DVLA V11 transaction with the addition of bar-coded tax discs on
20 November.
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These changes will be followed over the next couple of months by the introduction of a new
National Savings Bank Account and topping off all this, the migration of the bureau de
change product from the current standalone equipment to being completely integrated on the
Horizon platform. Finally the opportunity will also be taken to put in place a number of fixes
to increase user friendliness and the robustness of the system.
Testing, testing
Before such significant software changes can be released to the network the enhancements
must be rigorously tested. As you can imagine the existing Horizon platform is already
immensely complex and these enhancements are themselves far from simple — added to
this, S50 represents the first time that so many significant changes have been made at the
same time, which is an indication of just how quickly the rate of business change is
accelerating.
However ‘S50’ testing has run smoothly and as we enter the implementation stage things
continue to look good. Already 70 pre go live E Top Up pilot branches have had hundreds of
sales worth thousands of pounds without a hitch. Comments from customers include:
“It is much quicker at the Post Office®®, sometimes it takes as long as two minutes
for transactions to go through my local newsagents”
“l usually have to buy £10 Virgin top ups as some shops don’t sell £5 top ups, but!
can now get these at the Post Office®®“
The DVLA enhancements also appear set fair for smooth implementation with 75% of motor
vehicle licensing branches having already received the software ready for go live on 20
November, with the remaining 25% on schedule.
It's worth mentioning that this DVLA enhancement is the first major change for re taxing
vehicles in over 30 years and delivers much more simple handling for both branches, DVLA
and TP.
With no manual summarisation required for V11 transactions the process becomes quicker,
cheaper and far more accurate This saves money at the back end and frees up time on the
frontline for staff to concentrate on customer service. After all they'll need to remember to
ask customers paying by cheque or debit card whether they would like any cash back too, if
they bank with one of our partner banks!
Watch this space for updates on how the rest of the release goes.
Tony Baines — Finance Change Team -~ GRO i
Half year performance
You will have seen from a recent Focus newsbrief that Royal Mail Group made a profit for
the half year — for the first time in five years.
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In the six months to September 28 2003, Royal Mail Group made £3 million profit, before
tax and after exceptional items. But what about Post Office Ltd. And TP? Here are the
headline results for our own targets:
Post Office Ltd.
Cash inflow YTD of £108m
much better than planned
Number of card accounts
reach % million mark
Network Reinvention Underlying income £6m
Headcount reduction of YTD Loss £6m better than
Sick absence better “1 enjoy working here” 5%
Transaction Processing
Expenditure - Debt Recovery Measures -
Staff Costs 0.1m better than budget.
(No + budget received for Pay Award)
©©
©
Manpower - Exceptions and Enquiries —
+ 6 on Headcount due to double ups.
©
©
Headcount Reduction of 58
Sick Absence -
Labour unit costs -
Target Setting in Progress
TP Explanations:
Headcount reduction — this equates to a financial saving for this unit of 190k.
Labour unit costs - this is a new measure for the unit which specifically supports the CWU
bonus scheme for POs and PAs.
Debt Recovery measures - this is a new high level measure monitoring the unit's ability to
recover debt.
Exceptions and enquiries - this is a new entry to the performance targets and objectives
that measures volume and value of exceptions, in other words ‘work in progress’.
Data Prep exceptions is monitoring the management and delivery of a week's work within a
week.
Sick absence — this measures the performance of TP against a target of 4% and shows we
are currently running at a level of 5.4%, which equates to approximately 3,400 man hours or
16.5 people being absent for a full month.
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Mandy Jepson - TP Planning Manager —:
The grand tour
Ever noticed that we sometimes have groups of people being escorted around TP and
wonder why they are here?
Well quite often they are senior managers new to the Business, or senior managers who
have never had much to do with us before, who want to understand what we do.
The best way to show them is to give them a tour of our process, from Opening right through
to Debt Recovery and this is what is happening when you see or meet them.
An opportunity to influence our visitors
These visits provide us with an opportunity to influence key people in the Business (including
our Chairman, Sir Mike Hodgkinson and Post Office Ltd's Chief Executive David Mills, who
have both ‘done the tour’) and to gain their support for our future plans. In fact the tour of TP
is a standard part of the induction process for senior managers who are new to Post Office
Ltd.
They reinforce the links we have with other directorates and increase understanding of how
we support the retail line and Sales and Marketing. They also give us the opportunity to raise
any issues we may have about products and their processes and with other business policies.
This has been successful in that we are consulted much more widely than we used to be
about things that impact us.
We have one such visit later this month when Kevin Wheeler, Sales Planning and Analysis
Manager and Jonathan Hewett, Head of Sales are coming to TP.
Annette Bentley, Communication/Training Manager:
Efficiency surgeries
Senior staff and Operational CM1s working on the Efficiency Project are continuing to hold
surgeries so that any of our people who wish to talk to them in confidence can do so.
Appointments can be made by telephoning Annette Bentley on ext GRO }
The timetable up to the end of November 2003 is shown below:
Week Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
commencing
10 Nov 03 Steve Jakeman Vicky Noble Dave Hardie Jennifer Robson Alison Bolsover
David Skipworth Carole Cross Chris Clarke Julie Dart Ann Clarke
17 Nov 03 Carole Cross Ann Clarke David Skipworth Jennifer Robson Vicky Noble
Dave Hardie Chris Clarke Julie Dart Alison Bolsover Steve
Jakeman
24 Nov 03 Steve Jakeman Dave Hardie Vicky Noble Alison Bolsover — Ann Clarke
Jennifer Robson Julie Dart Jennifer Robson David Skipworth Carole Cross
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Bouquet
Letter received from Ron Greenfield, Post Office Ltd. Business Reporting and Performance
Manager:
Each month I meet with Alison Bolsover and various other members of the TP team
to review where we are on losses provisions and postings.
Last year Post Office Ltd losses and errors in the final profit and loss account
were £33m. We set a plan for this year of £27m. Since then:
- We have created several new loss codes
- Started posting losses out to Operations and Sales and Marketing
- TP implemented their new process of retail line write offs
And, no doubt, many other associated activities in TP and other parts of Post
Office Ltd.
At the half year stage the actual losses are c£12m and the latest forecast for
this year from directorates are £24mll
The increased focus and activity that losses are getting is clearly having an impact
on Post Office Ltd's bottom line and I would like to pass my thanks to all those in
TP who have played their part, however big or small in this.
Regards
Ron
Post Office Ltd.
Finance
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