Performance management boards on the bank floor : A study on the use of performance management boards as a foundation for continuous improvement in a Swedish bank

Abstract: Lean production is a production philosophy that is usually associated with theautomotive industry and companies like Toyota and Scania. The Nordic bank Nordeahas chosen to use the same approach to streamline production of their banking servicesand they call their concept Lean Banking. Within the Swedish banking industry Nordeais a pioneer within Lean production and the effects on the result have been verypositive.Nordea Account Products is the division within Nordea where the lean implementationstarted. Work in this division includes administration of loan products, cards, and ATMtransactions and the production takes place in what the report calls team level. Any teamthat has undertaken a transformation process to become lean uses a whiteboard, called aPerformance management board or PM board, to visualize the development ofperformance indicators and what activities the team is working with to achieve localperformance targets. Daily meetings, called performance management meetings, areheld to keep the team on track with the performance indicators, goals and improvementactivities in focus.In this thesis, work with the daily performance management in four teams at NordeaAccount Products has been studied. The findings has been reflected partly in Nordea'sown guidelines for how work should be conducted, and the relevant literature on thesubject. Furthermore, a benchmark made on the truck manufacturer Scania to see howthe daily monitoring and work with lean production is done there. The main scope is tosee if a company working with administrative production can learn anything from anexperienced production company within the industry, given that they both work withlean principles.The findings of the study summarizes that a connection between Nordea and Scania canbe made despite the fact that they work in very different industries. Nordea has comevery far on their lean journey but there is room for improvement. It is proposed thatNordea ensures the interest and commitment of the top managers to get a true chain ofdemand of the performance indicators on team level. And more resources have to beallocated to continuous improvement work on team level. Furthermore, it is suggestedthat Nordea considers the use of improvement teams in order to exploit the truepotential of the staff in the continuous improvement work. It is also suggested that keyindicators, with an emphasis on quality indicators, are made more measurable andtangible in order to stimulate continuous improvement. There is also potential forimprovement in the designs of charts, standards and in use of Value Stream mapping