Derbyshire Building Society has completed the first phase
of an integration project that has seen processing times on some
tasks cut from two days to just 10 minutes.
In addition to making business processes more efficient, the
project is aimed at underpinning a potential Windows 2003 roll-out
for core systems. The building society is using Tibco software to
link an ICL account management system, Fineos CRM and Lynx mortgage
software.
Before the integration project, business processes that had to use
data from all three systems took up to two days and had to be
carried out by skilled staff. Now equivalent tasks can be done by
most employees and take as little as 10 minutes.
Peter Tong, enterprise architect at Derbyshire Building Society,
said, "There are long-term e-business reasons for the integration
project and shorter-term e-business reasons. At the practical level
we are looking to gain efficiencies in organisation so we can make
tasks more automated and de-skill the work. This frees up staff
with premium skills to work elsewhere.
"We expect to achieve return on investment in up to five or six
years but the alternatives would have been more expensive. The
decision was not simply made on cost, it is also a technology
decision as we had to go with Tibco to support a migration to
Windows and SQL Server for our account management system."
Tong said the building society was undecided over whether to go
with Windows 2000 or 2003 and that a decision would be based on the
maturity of Windows 2003 and the planned project start time.
Tibco runs on Dell servers and comprises adapters to translate
existing data, business process orchestrators to define process and
a messaging layer.