Faced with the challenge of storing over 25-million documents annually, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), one of the biggest commercial banks with world-wide assets in excess of R524-billion, chose Mobius Electronic Document Warehouse Systems' ViewDirect enterprise document management solution to meet all its immediate and future requirements. With more than 2-million customers, 25 000 staff at group level and about 1 000 branches and affiliate offices across the globe, the specialist co-operative credit institution founded in 1913 today is a full service bank offering commercial, investment and merchant banking among its diverse portfolio of services. BNL, like many institutions of similar size, in recent years has experienced sharply higher demand for documents - 1500 a day is not unusual. Responding to requests while upholding the company's tradition for customer service excellence was becoming time-consuming and a drain on resources. So much so that extra staff were taken abroad. Yet there remained a clear requirement to speed up the process and free resources for other, more productive tasks. So BNL went about assessing document management packages that would efficiently archive documents and images, optimise response times and minimise storage media costs. The system BNL looked for also had to allow individual branches to search, view and reproduce documents relevant to their own customers. A related priority was to keep customer documents confidential through security and access restrictions. After conducting an extensive evaluation of available systems and holding discussions with existing users, BNL chose Mobius' ViewDirect mainly for its superior functionality, high volume capabilities, ease of installation and use, and extraordinary flexibility. Luca Malfatto, Technical Operator at BNL, reports: "Installation took a couple of days, but after customising the software to meet our exact needs, it amounted to a fortnight's work in total." ViewDirect, available in South Africa through Sandton-based Bateleur Software, lets BNL store statements, cheques and scanned documents into storage media such as tape or disk - media that are far more cost effective than paper, microfilm or microfiche. In addition, ViewDirect's ExterpriseIndexing function allows BNL to index and access unlimited numbers of documents. This ensures that customers can quickly view a complete list of all the documents related to an account. A further advantage is ViewDirect's media and device-independent UniversalArchive architecture, which allows the product to operate seamlessly in BNL's existing tape farm. More importantly, it gives the bank the freedom to choose any other storage devices or media in the future. ServerTransparency, another exceptional feature, allows users to access reports anywhere on the enterprise's five mainframes directly from BNL's local network servers, PCs and 3270 attached terminals. This means that, regardless of location, authorised users have access to information through ViewDirect. Not only is customer service thereby enhanced, but also employee productivity. Calls from users are reduced, and more effective use is made of resources. An extremely powerful feature is the intelligent matching of the frequency of document use with the speed and cost of storage device. "In terms of speed of accessing documents, BNL has made massive strides," Malfatto concludes. "Before ViewDirect, it took 7-10 days to process a request. Now, if a customer calls up for a monthly statement, employees can respond in less than two minutes when it appears in their screen." That's a huge productivity leap that banks in South Africa, like their counterparts in Italy and world-wide, surely would want to emulate.
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