One of the big four in South African banking has taken the plunge and implemented Lotus Notes in a bid to introduce an efficient, cost-effective, flexible and open culture in its Factoring financial service division
The Standard Bank of South Africa (SBSA) Factors project was implemented on 1 December 1996 and has been successfully running for the past year and a half.
According to Lesley Ann Watson, Q Data Consulting`s Factoring project manager: "The object of this development was to rewrite the factoring system and replace it with a more open, integrated application.
"The division needed an efficient, low cost and adaptable application, that was compatible with other systems throughout the bank," she says, adding, "the Factoring operation had to cater for enhancements and expansion in line with the growth of the business."
Juanita de Jong, SBSA systems analyst, says the division has managed to overcome a number of obstacles that have plagued it in the past. "The division had problems in a number of areas including long turn around, lost documentation, long development time and an increasing amount of paperwork.
"We used to use secretaries, who only had access to an office automation system to complete the forms and follow up on queries. What we have done now is rewrite the entire Factoring system from scratch, the idea being to enable anyone in the division to implement the job from start to finish, both at the office and in the field. All staff have to do now is take laptops to the customer. Presentations are professional, timeous, and can be tracked from start to finish, allowing us to offer a complete, top-notch service," De Jong says.
Currently, the factoring division is running Lotus Notes on Unix and Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Windows 95.
The factoring division has about 90 users on the system at present. Thirty of the operators are using mobile Compaq notebooks. This includes the Cape Town and Durban offices.
The Factoring division is operating on four Novell Servers IntranetWare 4.11 and Solaris ON A SUN BOX to keep things up and running smoothly.
Future plans include the division`s intention to migrate to a two-way application with Lotus Notes and Natural Adabas some time in 1998. We intend using Notes as the front-end application for some processes in the Factoring division," says Watson. "At the moment we can interface with any application that runs with Windows, but it is still a one-way link to Lotus Notes and we need to have it running both ways."
In the long runthe Factoring division intends using Notes to replace paper-based filing systems with an electronic database. "We can now keep history in a single place. Documents are easy to find and update and client histories and backgrounds are easier to trace," concludes Watson.
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