Every Two years, as a way of saying thanks...
Republic Bank provides a delightful end of year hamper to each of its more than three thousand team members. Staff get to choose from among five hamper options which are distributed across three locations in South, Central and North Trinidad. Staff indicate their preferred hamper and pick-up location beforehand and distribution takes place over two days across the multiple locations simultaneously.
The hamper distribution, while a joy to the staff, always presents a logistical challenge for the Bank’s organizing committee. Some of the issues include:
Ensuring that staff members collect the hamper type for which they registered
Dealing with staff choosing to collect at a different location or on a different day from which they registered
Handling scenarios in which staff members have friends or family collect on their behalf
Verifying whether staff members collected previously or at another location
Tracking distributions accurately for reconciliation with suppliers at each location at the end of each day.
Being a regular client of IN Events’ and recognizing the flexibility of the technology, Republic Bank approached us to develop a system that would make the entire collection and reconciliation process more manageable.
It was decided that they would compile their collection database internally which would include each staff member, their branch, their hamper choice, and their preferred pick up location. IN Events would then activate unique RFID cards for each staff member encoded with their respective collection details. These were packaged and distributed to staff beforehand, and they were required to walk with them along with a valid form of ID on the day to collect their hampers.
We setup our systems and provided staff, laptops and RFID readers to manage the onsite deployments at the multiple locations. At each location, the various hamper types were located in separate tents with appropriate signage, and an IN Events station was placed at each tent. All the locations were synced in the cloud, so each transaction was updated at all locations simultaneously, ensuring that no staff could collect at multiple locations and that there was a birds-eye view on the operation at all times.
Upon arrival, staff members presented their staff ID and activated RFID card which was scanned to verify collection. If the employee forgot to walk with their card, their name was used to put through the collection. The system would display their hamper option on screen and indicate whether they were at the right location with the option to put through the transaction even if they were not. There was also an option to indicate whether a friend or family member was collecting on the employee’s behalf and input that person’s name for reporting purposes. Finally, a detailed report of collections was immediately available which allowed for seamless reconciliation with the suppliers at the end of each event.
In the end, this was a massive success for Republic Bank and IN Events. Never before had the client seen such a quick turnover with minimal waiting times at their collections points. Staff were bewildered when they realized how quick the collection process was compared to previous years. The client also marveled that the reconciliation process with the suppliers which usually took a couple hours, was completed in a matter of minutes. After the event, the Bank was provided with detailed reports broken down by location, hamper type, ‘on behalf of’ collections, wrong location collections, and even change of hamper instances where persons made mistakes with their initial selection.
