Zions Bancorp Upgrades Workforce Solution

GMT Corp., a Norcross, Ga.-based provider of enterprise workforce and cash optimization solutions, announced at the BAI Retail Delivery Expo on Nov. 14 that Zions Bancorporation ($31.8 billion in assets) is among the first to take advantage of new dashboard functions in the latest release of the GMT Planet, version 9.5. With the new solution, Zions, a Salt Lake City holding company, can more closely monitor its internal performance, improve employee productivity and lower its staffing costs, according to GMT.

Zions has been using GMT Planet since 1992, and in its latest release, Zions will be able to use GMT's enhanced performance management dashboards to cross-reference scheduling data with company initiatives, such as increasing sales of various products and improving customer service. Initially used as a bank teller staffing solution, Zions expanded the GMT solution to become a comprehensive management tool for nearly all branch activities, with 10,000 employees using the system.

"GMT is in touch with what its customers really need, and its solutions are easy to use, highly accurate, affordable, and extensible across the enterprise," said Martin Dorrance, VP of staffing administration at Salt Lake City-based Zions First National Bank ($13.6 billion in assets), a subsidiary of Zions Bancorp. "The latest release of GMT Planet will give us an immediate pulse on our performance at the individual, branch and regional levels--alerting us to what is working and where we need to course correct."

GMT Planet reduced the time required for managers to enter scheduling data from several hours to less than 10 minutes per day. Managers could also now access and edit staffing data from a central repository, instead of the more cumbersome method of local storage on branch servers, to enhance the accuracy of forecasted transaction data to as high as 99 percent bank-wide and to drive operational efficiency, according to Simon Angove, CEO of GMT. The net result was a four percent reduction in staffing costs, along with a more efficient deployment of the Zions' workforce--changes that translated into hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential annual savings.

Additional savings are expected with the new dashboard functions. "The latest enhancements to GMT Planet stem from requests from customers, such as Zions," Angove said.