Fortis Bank's New Budgeting and Reporting Solution
Implementation of a Business Intelligence solution.
Fortis Bank Polska was a universal bank, which belonged to the BNP Paribas Group since 2009. It offers savings and investment products as well as a wide range of loans to individual customers. It provides companies with domestic and international financing solutions.
Client:
Fortis Bank
Industry:
Banking and Finance
Country:
Poland
Services:
Microsoft Excel and SQL Server 2000 Analytics Services
Challange
The existing system failed to address the budgeting issues. Fortis Bank had been relying on Excel for a long time, resulting in thousands of different file versions being sent annually. The growing volume of files and versions made budget management increasingly challenging, ultimately prompting Fortis Bank to implement a new solution.
The primary issue revolved around managing changes, affecting both budget calculations and the budget itself. Alterations in account structures or organizational arrangements led to inadequate distribution to accounts through macros.
What’s more, multiple versions of the budget, last-minute changes, and difficulties in reviewing the current version of the budget often led to duplication of work. The entire procedure resulted in high administrative expenses, complicating the Bank’s ability to effectively manage expenses and budgets.
Solution
To resolve all these issues, Euvic suggested using a Microsoft SQL 2000 Server database with multidimensional analysis services, using Excel as the user interface.
Data for the database was sourced from implementation data provided by the bank’s transaction system and manually entered by authorized staff. The user interface was Microsoft Excel, which communicated directly with the database, ensuring data consistency and avoiding issues with email overload and changing versions.
The access control system leveraged Active Directory (AD) for employee data management and access rights reporting. It ensured that each employee could only access their own data. Additionally, the system offered data summaries through PivotTable, making it convenient to generate reports in various formats using the available fields.
Impact
Implementation of a Business Intelligence solution for Fortis Bank resulted in an 80% timesaving in budgeting and cost-reporting processes. This initiative also brought about enhanced control over budgeting, centralized storage of financial data, and increased possibilities for in-depth analysis. What’s more, the implementation was economical, leveraging existing licenses for Microsoft Excel and SQL Server 2000 analytics services.
Summary
- Cost-effective solution.
- Intuitive User-Experience.
- Ability to scale for growth.
- Easy to reduce Workloads.
- Guarantee of operational enhancement.
- Improvement of financial oversight.
