“Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place” – Sarah Dessen
I was leaving the government before completing the minimum two years in my contract. That meant I was supposed to pay back some of the money that they had spent on my move there. Thanks to good old Gord – somehow he managed to get that waived. Margret threw a big party for us. She told me not to worry about Lynda and the kids, she and Gord would keep an eye on them. That’s was good enough for me. I was able to relax and think about the future. I knew for sure that Lynda was quite capable of taking care of the things when I was not around.
The truth was that the idea of going to Calgary alone to join ATB was kind of strange, too. I was so used to seeing my wife and kids every single day. But Lynda was supporting me all the way. There was no doubt in my mind that she liked Calgary as well as the people she met there and she wanted to make it happen. I was hoping that at least once in the next few weeks I might be able to go to Fredericton to visit my family.
The good news was that Lynda got in touch with the sorority people in their head office in the States to find out about the their chapter in Calgary. She got the contact information for the Calgary person and she spoke to her. Lynda let her know that we would coming to live in Calgary that she would be attending the first monthly meeting in the last week of June 1982.
I wanted Lynda to keep mom informed about the changes. Lynda said she spoke to mom recently. Mom was getting a little tired of keeping track of our new addresses and telephone numbers in her address book. Mom said she was running out of pages to keep up with the changes and she wanted us to stop moving from city to city and province to province. I said to Lynda please give mom a new address book for the next Christmas and she will be alright.
Lynda also took care of contacting the real estate people in order to put our house up for sale. Unfortunately, it was a buyers market and we were not going to make any money. This was no different than the last three houses that we sold and had made no money.
While I was enthusiastic in a way to go to ATB and face the new challenges, at the same time I was sad that I was leaving behind a professional team of employees who supported me unconditionally. They offered me genuine encouragement, reassurance, and passion to get thing accomplished. I decided to call a meeting to explain my situation to them that I had promised Gord I would be here for only a couple of years in that time I would do my best to accomplish what needed to be done. I told them that I was so fortunate that I found a bunch of folks like them who had desire, ambition, and aptitude to help me with my plan. In fact they were so good that it didn’t even take two years for me to accomplish my plan. One of the cheeky buggers among them said – please don’t make it sound as if is our fault that you are leaving. Nevertheless, they ended up giving me a big party and Gord was asked to give me the gift they had bought and say a couple of words about me. It was nice to be appreciated.
Before I left Fredericton, I wanted to have a word with the kids. I asked both of them what they thought about our move to Calgary. They said sounds good. I also said that unfortunately, I have to leave you behind because of their school year but I promised to come back for a short visit as soon as I can. In the meanwhile, I asked both of them to help mom and they said they would.
ATB had booked me in a nice long-term hotel which was only a couple of blocks from the office where I was supposed to work.
I left Fredericton on Saturday the 27th of March in the afternoon. When I got to Calgary the weather was pleasant. The place was like a little apartment with cooking facilities. It was nice and clean and there were several other business people staying there. There was a restaurant in the lobby for those who don’t like to cook so I decided to check it out right after putting away my things in the apartment. It wasn’t too bad.
I spent Sunday afternoon just browsing around and checking things out in the downtown. In the evening I went to see somebody I used to know in Toronto who had moved to Calgary with his wife a couple of years back. They were very gracious to pick me up and I ended up having supper with them. I had a nice Sunday evening.
On Monday March 29th, I showed up at the office. Gerry’s secretary, Jean was expecting me and was kind enough to take me to Gerry’s office. She brought coffee for me and said Gerry will be here any minute. The last meeting that I had with Gerry at the restaurant when we were here, Gerry had explained to me that officially I would be reporting to Scott. It wouldn’t make any difference to me who I would reported to as long as I got things done without any interruptions.
Once Gerry showed up, we had coffee together and chatted about the float. Following our conversation he took me to see Scott and he left me with him. Scott said let’s go and see your office which was across from his. It was a fair size office but nothing special. I asked Scott to take me to the Cheque Clearing Centre where I wanted to see those folks. I realized that there was no clearing done on the weekends which also means that there wasn’t any float to talk about. Scott took me there and said he would come back for me around 12:00 PM to go for the lunch.
I spent time talking to the lead consultant who gave me a detailed outlook of the process and realized that timing was everything. Getting all cheques delivered from each branch all over the province on time and get those cheques sorted out into the following two categories:
- On Us: These are the cheques which were cashed in the ATB branches from the existing ATB accounts and they needed to be posted to each individual account; and
- On Them: These are the cheques from various banks which were cashed or deposited in individual ATB accounts which needed to be recovered from the respective banks via the Bank of Canada. Furthermore, these cheques were sorted again to send them to each respective bank so that they could process them accordingly.
Part of the process was that after 10:00 PM cheques began coming in by carriers from all the other bank centres in Calgary. All those cheques were drawn in various banks on the ATB accounts. All those cheques had to be posted on individual ATB accounts and necessary payments had to be settled with each bank via the Bank of Canada. Furthermore, those cheques had to be sorted and sent to the respective ATB branches for their record keeping.
By the time Scott showed up, I was desperately looking for a break.
In the afternoon Gerry took me next door where the computer room was located. The Government of Alberta had several departments located in Calgary and in order to meet their computing needs, they had maintained a computer centre in Calgary ATB was one of their clients.
The computer centre was managed by a director and his name was Roy Haure. He was in his 50’s and he was a typical manager with limited technical knowledge. Gerry left me with Roy and I spent almost two hours talking about the ATB computer operation. I also talked about my background more specifically related to the government of New Brunswick. Roy said he was happy that I had the right background and experience to work with them. Hopefully he wouldn’t be talking to anybody else in ATB as they had no clue about what was going on. I was pleased to hear that but I wanted to reserve my judgement.
I thought the only way I would be able to learn about the Cheque Processing process if I worked nights in each section that was responsible for processing cheques. I briefly discussed the topic with Gerry and Scott and they thought that was an excellent idea.
Typically, I used to go to the office around lunch time, have lunch in the cafeteria with Gerry and Scott and work until 5:00 PM in the office. Then I would go to my hotel and rest until 7:00 PM, have supper in the downstairs in the restaurant and go to work at the Cheque Processing Centre until 6:00 AM. I used to leave messages for Gerry and Scott saying that everything went okay or we had some problems.
One Friday when I was getting ready to leave the office, Scott showed up and asked me if I had any plans for the weekend. I said I would be spending most of my weekend like any other here in the office. He said I want you to come to our place on Saturday and meet my family. He said my wife’s a real good cook. She wants to cook something for us and she wants to know if you have any preferences. I said I am totally grateful for such a nice offer. I am sure she must have an idea about how desperate I am for a homecooked meal. I said I don’t have any preferences except that we don’t eat pork. He said I will let her know. He said you don’t have to dress up and I will pick you up on Saturday around 6:00 PM right outside of your hotel.
Sue, Scott’s wife was an excellent host. It was a delightful atmosphere as well as delicious food and I enjoyed immensely. More importantly, she had a surprise for me. She said I wanted to surprise you by telling you that your wife’s name is Lynda and she spells it with an “Y”. Furthermore, your daughter’s name’s Maxine and your son’s name’s Adam. I was shocked and said how can you know this as I had never mentioned it to anybody in the office. She said she was a sorority sister for a longtime and currently she is a part of the Welcome Committee in Calgary. She said Lynda spoke to our president who in turn informed us that one of our sorority sisters from New Brunswick is relocating to Calgary and she is going to join our chapter in the month of June. It didn’t take more than a minute for me to figure it out. She said come on guys, give me some credit. How many times do I get to hear New Brunswick more than once in the same year.
The first week of working nights, I dedicated to making observations and documenting questions to improve my understanding. I couldn’t possibly interrupt the process in the middle of the night to ask questions. I decided to have a meeting with each person when they were not working who was responsible for a certain function within the organization. Fundamentally, I asked them questions to understand and define dependencies on each process or function that they performed.
They all said speeding up one process cannot possibly help because those processes were interdependent. Therefore, I had to find out the common inhibitors. For instance, all activities in the Centre were totally dependent on the arrival of cheques from various Branches. In order to understand the problem, I had to focus on the fact that the main reason of the creation of ATB was to help Albertan farmers. Therefore the majority of the Branches were created all over the map in the interior parts of Alberta. Here’s some background:
- Alberta is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three Prairie Provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Territories (NWT) to the north, and the USA state of Montana to the south. It is one of the only two landlocked provinces in Canada (Saskatchewan being the other). The eastern part of the province is occupied by the Great Plains, while the western part borders the Rocky Mountains. The province has a predominantly continental climate but experiences quick temperature changes due to air aridity. Seasonal temperature swings are less pronounced in western Alberta due to occasional Chinook winds; and
- There was a huge political financial calamity in the late 1930’s in Alberta. However, in 1937 Premier William Aberhart came up with the Bank Taxation Act in 1937 which led to creating a State Credit House which facilitated some banking services in small communities where larger banks had previously closed. Subsequently, the Alberta government created the Alberta Treasury Branches with $200,000 of provincial funds as capital. The first Alberta Treasury Branch (ATB) was opened in Rocky Mountain House on September 29, 1938, followed by branches in Edmonton, Andrew, Grande Prairie, Killam, and Paul which opened the next day.
The network of carrier service was designed carefully; nevertheless the weather was another dynamic factor. The schedule for receiving cheques from Branches was based on the location of the Branches and the availability of carrier services in that area. Some Branches were located in such remote areas that there weren’t any carrier services available nearby. It was definitely a challenge.
It was interesting for me to learn that all cheques are MICR coded. MICR, stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. It is a unique 9-digit code that helps identify a specific bank branch that is part of the Electronic Clearing System (ECS). MICR is mainly used to clear cheques in a faster and error-free manner. This code helps the banks to check the origin of the document and find out if the cheque is counterfeit. This is not the only use of this key. It can also act as a very useful tool in many other aspects.
The code consists of a bank code, a document-type indicator, a bank account number, a cheque amount, and a control indicator. The first three digits define the city code, the next three represent the bank code and the last three digits are the code of the bank branch.
A special machine or ink is used to read these characters.
Here’s a critical point of the process. When a customer writes a cheque, it’s written in his or her hand-writing which is not machine readable. For example, cheques received from each Branch needed to be machine-read. In order to do so, each cheque had to be MICR coded in the Centre as a first and fundamental activity to reflect the amount of the cheque which complete the required MICR code on each cheque.
We had only three or four Coding Machines and it was a time consuming activity. However, it wasn’t going to do any good if we decided to add more Coding machines as the cheques were being delivered only from a few Branches at a time. If we wanted to speed up this process, not only did we have to add some Coding Machines, but the carrier schedules had to be changed to be coordinated with each other. Perhaps the biggest problem was getting Branches to finish their work faster and send those cheques ASAP.
Once the MICR coded cheques with the respective amounts were sent to the next processing station, they had to run through the other machines to calculate the total amount of the cheques for that particular Branch which had to be balanced. Otherwise, that would start another time consuming activity to balance the totals. Then those cheques would be sent to the two main Cheque Processing machines which read MICR codes and create input files for further processing.
Then there was another time consuming process which was purely manual to balance and process “Large Amount Cheques” from each branch which were sent in a different bundle.
Once everything was done in the Centre and an electronic file was transferred to the local Datacentre, they would then do whatever needed to be done to transmit all banking information for that day to IBM in Toronto. IBM did all the final processing to post those cheques to individual accounts and maintain an up-to-date record on their huge computers.
The other important aspect of the total cheque processing that I learned working nights was that ATB had no identity as far as the Bank of Canada was concerned simply because ATB was not a Chartered Bank. Therefore ATB had been using the Canadian Bank of Commerce (CIBC) as their representative to make necessary settlements on behalf of ATB with the Bank of Canada first thing in the morning on each working day. This required the Centre to deal with CIBC during the processing night and they were having some problems which were causing processing delays.
After working nights for weeks, I was only able to make a few minor changes in the flow of information and processing methods but the fact remained that there was definitely a need for more processing power. However, even making some minor changes and adding some manpower wherever needed we managed to minimize the level of daily float significantly which was the only way for the bankers to measure the improvements that I was injecting into the environment.
I documented each major process with the Centre to define:
- What do we need to initiate or proceed with the scheduled work every night?
- Why do we need that information and what was the source of that information?
- When do we get the needed information?
- Where does that information come from? and
- Who’s responsible for providing that information?
Additionally, I also identified the following as major obstacles needed to be overcome in order to accomplish our targets:
- Branches needed to be trained and better coordinated to improve the efficiency of their process to send their cheques faster;
- The existing carrier contracts needed to be evaluated with the focus not only for faster delivery but also the consistency;
- The hardware and software for the MICR coding as well as Cheque Processing machines needed to be replaced ASAP;
- Employees needed to be trained to better perform their functions; and
- The terms and conditions associated with the CIBC contract needed to be appraised; either requiring them to meet our expectations for the money we have been paying them, or finding another Chartered Bank that would meet these requirements.
Gerry and Scott were very happy with my little report and they supported every aspect of the report staunchly.
