Barclays Bank PLC

Barclays Bank Sales Development Team had an inefficient manual system for managing the overall demands made on resources by simultaneous promotional campaigns. It was clear this system needed replacing, but less clear what it should be replaced with. Blueberry took a prototypical approach to design, and supported the client from the early stages of determining its requirements right through to the deployment of the finished system.

The Client

Barclays Bank Sales Development Team (SDT) is responsible for co-ordinating the resourcing of all the bank’s promotional campaigns. Its main task is to anticipate and avoid those times when a resource (such as a mailing house or a call centre) might be overloaded by overlapping campaigns.

Barclays Bank typically runs around 100 promotional campaigns each year. Each promotion requires a particular set of resources to support it, such as the use of a mailing house, a centre for processing mailed customer responses, a call centre for processing customer telephone responses, etc. Furthermore, each promotion will attract a different number of customer responses, and some will attract responses more quickly than others. For example, the Customer Response Profile of a campaign that offers a limited number of free gifts is likely to be much ‘shorter and sharper’ than usual. The level and timing of demand placed upon each of the different resources by a campaign will depend on its Customer Response Profile.

Previously, details of the campaigns and their predicted Customer Response Profiles were stored in separate Excel spreadsheets. Whenever the SDT wanted to predict the total demand on resources at some particular time in the future they would have to collate complex data from several spreadsheets. Clearly, they needed an integrated system to hold details of all the campaigns together—such a system would be able to generate various reports and predictions automatically.

Initially, the client had very little idea of the form an automated system should take, or of how best to enter details of the campaigns into such a system. There was also an urgent requirement to start storing details of campaigns in the system as soon as possible. Therefore, Blueberry proposed a prototypical approach to system design in this case.

Blueberry built a fully-working prototype very quickly using Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools: Borland C++ Builder for the GUI front end and Quick Report for the reports. This prototype allowed the client to understand better its requirements for the final system, and during further discussions with Blueberry a design for the final system emerged. While Blueberry was implementing this system the client was using the prototype to store details of new campaigns.

A Screenshot from the Final System

When Blueberry delivered the final system it included a mechanism to import the campaign details already stored in the prototype. Blueberry staff worked on-site to install the system, manage the migration from the prototype, and support the client in using it.

Even though it was very flexible, the final system was truly a “turnkey” system: i.e. SDT staff could sit down and immediately start entering data into the system and producing reports. It was also a secure, multi-user system, with different users having access to different system facilities. Finally, it produced very high quality reports—an extract from a typical example is shown below.

A Report Produced by the System