Scheduling tool for 300 bank branches
Banque régionale (confidentiel)
A French regional bank operates 300 branches, around 2,000 employees and dozens of different branch typologies, each with its own opening rules, quotas and team management policies. Historically, scheduling was handled through shared Excel spreadsheets, emails and local decisions made by branch managers. Every change involved a chain of manual exchanges, with frequent errors and no consolidated view at the network level. The bank needed a single business tool capable of handling the complexity of its organization, applying its internal rules without approximation, and giving each hierarchical level the right view on the right information. No off-the-shelf software covered these specific business rules without heavy customization that would have cost more than a custom build.
The real challenge of this project was not technical but organizational. We first had to deeply understand the banking hierarchy, quota rules by branch type, remote work constraints negotiated in company agreements, team rotation rules and exceptions authorized by regional managers. Then, we had to translate this human complexity into reliable, auditable and reversible application rules. On the technical side, integration into a secure banking environment sets its own pace: IT-approved technologies, security review processes, sovereign hosting constraints, integration with the identity repository and fine-grained access rights management. Add to that the ongoing coordination between product teams, the bank's business owners, IT, security and managed hosting.
We started with a multi-week business immersion phase dedicated to a complete mapping of the rules. Interviews with branch managers, workshops with HR, review of company agreements, reading of internal procedures: the goal was that every business rule of the future tool could be justified by an existing document or a validated decision. On this basis, we designed a multi-role application with fine-grained permissions by hierarchical level (branch, region, headquarters), hierarchical validation workflows for sensitive requests, and real-time dashboards adapted to each profile. The application was integrated with the bank's SSO (Azure AD), deployed in the bank's secure infrastructure and documented so that IT could handle its maintenance. Business rules were externalized in a dedicated engine so they could evolve without redeployment. Rollout was done in regional waves to limit risks and support change management.