Northern Ireland`s largest bank, Northern Bank, is using Seagate Software`s Holos Business Intelligence system to deliver key sales- and profit-related information very quickly to a wide range of users. The system has played an important role in supporting the bank`s drive to apply common key measures and reporting systems across its branch network.
Northern Bank, a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group is currently Northern Ireland`s most profitable company as well as its largest bank. It boasts 30 % or more of the province`s business customers, current accounts and personal loans. In conjunction with its subsidiaries, it offers a complete range of banking and financial services, delivered through a network of 98 branches, 11 business centres and 180 automated teller machines (ATMs).
The bank has been a user of Seagate Holos since 1990, when a decision was made to adopt a systematic approach to management information. For several years, Seagate Holos was used by a number of senior managers within the bank to analyse sales and profitability of the retail network.
Increasing the use of management information
In 1995, a major review of the bank`s management information objectives resulted in an investment to deliver performance information to all the bank`s branches.
Although we planned a tenfold increase in the number of users distributed over a wide area, with a substantially larger database, we were confident that Seagate Holos was still the best solution. It had served us well and had the potential to meet all our future needs, commented Malcolm Longridge, project leader at National Australia Group (Europe) Services Ltd (NSE), the company responsible for providing information technology (IT) services to all four National Australia Bank Group banks in Europe.
A hardware upgrade was needed to support the increased number of users, and at the same time Seagate Holos was upgraded to version 5, with Windows clients. Over a six-month period, the application was rewritten to take account of the new management structure, and existing data was migrated to the new hardware and database. The experience already gained by NSE`s developers allowed this work to be done entirely in-house.
Speed of Information Delivery
Today, Seagate Holos has approximately 130 users within Northern Bank, and is equally valued by the end-user and the software developer. It has proved itself capable of dealing with the increased volumes and complexity of data needed to monitor the performance of all the retail units. The system is used mainly for performance management at a branch level through weekly sales reporting and monthly profit reporting, using data gathered from a variety of operational systems.
Sales reporting involves the comparison of product sales with the branch`s targets, while profit reporting involves the production of a profit and loss statement, which managers can use to analyse branch performance and to manage controllable costs. According to Mark Walker, former project manager for management information at Northern Bank, speed of information delivery has been a crucial benefit of the Seagate Holos-based system, with weekly sales reports being available by start of business on Monday morning and monthly profitability reports within five working days of the end of the reporting period.
Longridge claims that the advanced on-line analytical processing (OLAP) architecture used by Seagate Holos makes it ideal for the bank`s hierarchical organisation. It is possible to look at information at any level, from the bank as a whole down to relationship managers within individual branches.
Information Consolidation
Another significant benefit of Seagate Holos is that it allows information to be consolidated from many different sources. Many branch customers are also customers of one or more of the bank`s subsidiaries, and Seagate Holos makes it possible for branch managers to see at a glance the various performance measures by branch, whether core retail business or business managed by other financial services companies within the group. Seagate Software Holos has been used to implement a front-end data capture facility via the standard branch desktop. Users also have access to historical data covering up to four years. This facility is useful for trend analysis, planning and performance tracking.
Seagate Holos has provided us with an excellent infrastructure that is flexible enough to respond to changing organisational needs, Said Longridge.
Focus on Business Success
Seagate Holos has played a major part in focusing our attention on the parts of the business that are relevant to our ongoing success. With Seagate Holos, users at head office and all the branches see the same type of information, delivered in the same way. This ensures that they have a common understanding of what is important for the bank. In terms of delivering key information very quickly to a wide range of users, Seagate Software Holos has provided us with highly significant benefits, added Walker.
The bank plans to continue to expand the scope of Seagate Holos by extending the user base and adding new data sets. Both Longridge and Walker agree that Seagate Holos imposes no constraints on the achievement of the bank`s business objectives.
When evaluating new business needs, we never have to consider the limitations of Seagate Holos, we have confidence in its ability to deliver.
Northern Bank`s successful implementation of Seagate Holos now seems set to be repeated more widely. Recently, NSE carried out a detailed evaluation of high-end management information tools and selected Seagate Holos as the preferred choice for the European Group.
We looked at vendor performance in terms of support, performance during the evaluation process, and customer references. Based on criteria such as cost of ownership, ease of integration and feature-richness, Seagate Holos was a clear winner, commented Malcolm Longridge, project leader at National Australia Group (Europe) Services Ltd .
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