CYNtheSYS

The dislcosures made to the BBC and subsequently to Andrew George MP and journalists at a meeting at the House Commons revealed that the Clydesdale, Yorkshire and Northern Banks operated a structured, detailed and auditable system for costing, tracking and refining their costs of conducting various operation within the bank including the processing of delinquent accounts.

The system, which was apparently introduced about 2002 was called CYNthesys - Clydesdale Yorkshire Northern the system.

With hindsight, CYNthesys is straightforward and obvious.

It amounts merely to deconstructing a manually conducted process within an organisation into its constituent parts and then allocating a code and a time in seconds for each part.

So, Quote:

• A100 - switch on computer - 10 standard seconds

• A101 - retrieve customer record - 4 standard seconds

• A102 - data entry - 3 key strokes - 4 standard seconds

• A103 - retrieve sub-record - 2 standard seconds

• A104 - data entry - 12 keystrokes - 6 standard seconds

Andrew George and the press were shown a system containing almost 300 coded operations with their ideal timings next to them.

It then becomes quite easy for a time & motion analyst to observe any particular operation - such as bouncing a direct debit, to recognise which of the CYNthesys elements are being used, to note the codes of those elements down, and to find out the ideal timings for each element.

A simple piece of maths then adds up all the timings to give the answer that bouncing a direct debit should take XXX seconds.

The CYNthesys codes were actually contained in hard-copy form but an ideal way of using them would be to render them into a spreadsheet which would then do the calculations very quickly and automatically.

Andrew George MP did inspect such a spreadsheet.

Once a process has been timed, 12.83% is added to allow for toilet breaks, illness, holidays etc - so one can see that some of the overheads are already costed into the system.

The fact that the system is called CYNthesys shows clearly that it is not only in use by the Yorkshire Bank but also by the Clydesdale and (until it was sold off in 2004) by the Northern Bank as well.

The Northern Bank was sold off shortly after the completion of an Irish High Court report which identified serious improprieties relating to overcharging, tax avoidance and - penalty charging - by the Northern's siamese twin - The National Irish Bank (also part of the CYN group owned by the National Australia Group.) National Irish Bank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia