BoE Corporate chooses SAP as IT partner

SAP Africa has announced that BoE Corporate, a division of BoE Bank Limited, went live nationally during October 2001 on the mySAP.com e-business platform. The R20 million implementation will assist Durban-based BoE Corporate in catering for the financial requirements of the middle corporate and professional markets with more efficiency.

"In order for us to prosper as a niche corporate bank, we required a technology infrastructure that provides us with a single view of our clients across all lines of our business, as well as a system that is integrated and flexible for future expansion. We have established the foundation for the provision of future e-business initiatives to our clients. Another key factor was ongoing lower cost of ownership," says Andrew Lefevre, project manager at BoE Corporate.

BoE Corporate conducted an intensive selection process that consisted of 47 vendors and solution providers. "We selected SAP Africa as our long-term technology partner, because they were able to demonstrate a clear understanding of our objectives and business needs and would be in a position to provide a long term and stable technology relationship. The key differentiator was SAP's offering of integrated solutions and its modular approach, enabling us to extend the functionality as and when needed," says Lefevre.

According to Grant Hall, SAP Africa's regional manager for KwaZulu-Natal, BoE Corporate's objectives highlighted what mySAP.com is all about. "The SAP solutions in place will make internal communication far more efficient and synchronised, while providing a flexible platform for New Economy business," says Hall.

SAP replaced five legacy systems that incorporated 90% of the business application process, including the general ledger, instalment-based credit management as well as other operational management accounts. Lefevre adds: "Our legacy systems required manual intervention and data mergers before comprehensive consolidated reports could be produced.

"It took us about 10 to 15 working days after the ledger closed to obtain a detailed balance sheet and income statement. With the mySAP.com implementation we can expect to obtain detailed financial reports within three days after month-end."

The mySAP.com implementation consisted of SAP Enterprise Management (Financial Accounting, Business Information Warehouse, Management Accounting and Strategic Enterprise Management), SAP Corporate Financial Management, SAP Knowledge Management and SAP Workflow.

"The SAP Knowledge Warehouse, combined with the SAP Business Information Warehouse for managing structured data, provides a solid foundation for BoE Corporate's business intelligence requirements. Decision-support and analysis solutions, such as SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SAP SEM), complete the picture to provide an industry-wide, strategic business perspective," adds Hall.

"The solution forms the basis for BoE Corporate's strategic business infrastructure, that supports core financial and business processes with the possibility to add additional mySAP applications," says Hall.

BoE Corporate have seen increased functionality with regards to loan administration, managing and extracting information, risk and profit management and reporting functionality.

"The mySAP application platform offers high-performance capabilities for strategic planning, financial accounting, profitability analysis, risk analysis and fully integrated customer account systems. We have more versatility in terms of loan flexibility, we can easily accommodate clients that wish to tailor their loan repayments and interest rate settings," says Lefevre.