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Case Study: A Major Bank Systems Merger
This study describes Arum’s engagement with a major UK bank in 2005 and involves merging two separate Debt Manager installations onto a single instance of the system. The originating systems were operating on different platforms and versions of the software.
The Challenge
A key medium term strategy for the bank was the consolidation and streamlining of its major systems. The potential for savings in this area was regarded as very significant and a mainstream initiative was set in motion to progress this integration as quickly as possible and practicable. Part of this initiative involved running all collections and recoveries activities throughout the Bank under a single instance of Debt Manager. The Bank was running with different versions of the Debt Manager product and Arum’s core task was to identify areas of incompatibility between the systems with a focus on those that involved significant impact to either business.
The Outcome
Arum successfully completed their core task to a high quality, within the allotted time, and this was a key input to the Bank’s main project stream. Following on from this success, the Bank engaged Arum to add extra value by further engagement with the internal project team, providing additional knowledge of the Debt Manager product and facilities. This initiative left the Bank with a much better understanding of the product and functionality. This was a win win for both as not only did the Bank team benefit from this knowledge handover (an unexpected bonus) but Arum enjoyed a stimulating and positive engagement.
How did we achieve this successful outcome?
By understanding our customer’s business and working closely with the Bank in the critical early planning stages. Our in depth knowledge of the Debt Manager product and history was vital to the success of the migration and fundamental to increasing knowledge of Debt Manager systems within the Bank.
THE PROJECT
Organisation Background
The Bank offers a full range of banking and related financial services to a large client base of personal and small business customers. The Bank prides itself in customer service and has won many independent accolades for the level of customer service it provides, including "best buy" awards from Which?
The Group operates:
- a major branch network throughout Great Britain
- a 24 hour telephone banking service
- a fully fledged Internet banking service, the first on the High Street
- tailored accounts to suit everyone from the financially excluded to the affluent
- a network of ATMs, many in convenience locations like railway stations, airports and shopping centres
- an award winning business current account and network of dedicated business relationship managers
The Bank's commitment to innovation meant that last year it became one of the first High Street banks to remove the "repayable on demand" clause from business overdrafts and now offers almost every financial product - from mortgages to stakeholder pensions - online. It was first to develop a basic bank account for the financially excluded, the Key Account, and also offers a basic business bank account.
Project Background
The business strategy going forward was to streamline the various IT Systems including running all collections and recoveries activities from the same version of Debt Manager.
Different versions of Debt Manager were being used (CS V2 and V4.1 GS) and the decision was taken to backward engineer their configuration to match V4.1 with a view to an upgrade to the very latest version at a later date.
Project Aims
- The project’s main deliverable was to integrate the Banks' Debt Manager systems onto a single platform.
- The DM systems merge was to be implemented throughout all areas of the business from sales right through to collections and recoveries.
- A pre-condition was that all regulatory differences within the different banks were met as well as differences that the geographically location of the customer base force.
- An important consideration was business continuity. The business operation was required to function as normal.
- Any changes required were kept to a minimum and that the resultant solutions were kept simple.
Arum Challenges
- Timescale. This was very tight within this project for the Arum engagement meaning that getting up to speed as quickly as possible was crucial. The project had already passed business and initial functional specification and therefore the Arum consultants were required to work to these specifications.
- Redundant code. The target configuration included significant redundant code meaning that all analysis work had to consider this as prior documentation had been minimal.
- Using Earlier DM version. This meant facing the task of moving to an earlier version and along with that, reduced functionality. With this in mind there was a need to keep the same level of business processes with this earlier version of the software.
- Queries, Routers, MARRs. The configuration utilised a significant number of queries, routers MARRs.
Arum Role
Arum’s engagement was initially focused on the analysis of the target system and identifying areas that would not be compatible with the merging system, meaning that new code would need to be written to divert accounts away from a process. This task was completed well within the timescales given the initial estimate of 3 internal resources for 4 months was completed by Arum with 2 people in 6 weeks.
Once the core work was in hand the Arum consultants then assisted in other areas of the project and also helped to increase the Bank’s knowledge of the Debt Manager product within the Project Team. A number of mini workshops were held with the team to this end and this initiative was felt to be of real added value.
A third task assigned to the Arum team was the analysis and design of the migration process. This design consultancy was a key stage in the integration of the two banks it was agreed that Arum’s knowledge and support was invaluable in the ultimately successful implementation.
In summary the main areas covered:
- Management of requirements gathering stage
- Review Current DM implementation (inc. 80 Routers, 1400 MARRs)
- Identify conflicts between systems
- Created Requirements Specs, Functional Spec and fed into Application Design Documentation
- Creation of a Migration Strategy
Project Outcome
The migration to a single instance of Debt Manager was completed on time. The implementation successfully merged the later version of DM back onto the older version V4.1.
Arum delivered:
- Analysis of the software incompatibility
- Proposals for handling the above
- Impact on the Banks’ routers and queries
- Migration strategy
- Debt Manager product consultancy and knowledge transfer program
The Bank was delighted and commended Arum for their contribution to this important strategic project.