The Business
Our Client, a leading global investment bank with a substantial private client base. Its businesses divisions are mutually reinforcing and as a leader in the German and European banking sector, the bank continues to grow in North America, Asia, and other key Emerging markets.
With more than 100,000 employees in over 70 countries, the Bank offers unparalleled financial services throughout the world. Such an organization demands Business Intelligence of the highest quality.
The Challenge
We were commissioned to be the lead technical Consultants as the Bank underwent a major structural reorganization to achieve leaner IT services. As part of this, a single EPM and Business Intelligence system was required. Their current systems delivered BI through Cognos.
As well as changing their BI tool from Cognos to Business Objects, they also wanted to consolidate their source systems.
The Solution
Our consultants worked closely with the business to understand the requirements as well as the frustrations with the legacy systems. By utilizing our experience of both BI tool-sets we created a seamless migration. One of the key complaints from the users was the performance of the reporting.
We worked on both the back end Oracle 11 systems and the BI front end to achieve major improvements in performance. As a result, query times were reduced by over 80%, from 30 seconds to 4 seconds.
Our in-depth knowledge of the EPM space meant that we were able to model the banks’ data to provide a user-friendly and intuitive user experience.
By implementing aggregate awareness (summary rather than detailed data) we were able to provide significant performance gains.
The Benefits
One of the key benefits of using Business Objects was that we were able to provide Universes over each of the legacy source systems as well as the new EPM software. This ability to merge data in reports and dashboards from multiple universes meant that the
staged source system migration had no impact on the users reporting experience as there was a seamless integration of the data between old and new systems. As a result of the project, the bank retired 3 legacy source systems as well as their previous
Business Intelligence software.
The bank can now take a global view of its projects and programs, measuring run rates, budgets, performing cost-benefit analyses and monitoring RAG statuses. All of these form an enterprise-wide BI system that can grow with the business’ requirements.
Such was the success of the project, the bank have retained 2 of our consultants on-site to deliver ongoing BI reporting including Management Reporting, Xcelcius Dashboards and Mobile phone dashboards. The bank benefits from our technical expertise as well
as maintaining a continuity of systems knowledge and experience, something they previously lacked.