West Bromwich re-writes financial BI

The mutual building society has embarked on a project to introduce Cognos business intelligence to improve its decision-making processes and ability to compete in the financial services market.

By Miya Knights, 4 Feb 2008 at 17:20

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West Bromwich Building Society is using new business intelligence (BI) software to rebuild its financial management capabilities and improve its visibility of real-time business performance.

The mutual society first started using TM1 from vendor Cognos in April last year and is currently rebuilding its data models using the BI application, which it will use to facilitate more sophisticated and granular views of key performance metrics, as well as provide more flexible and detailed forecasts.

Andrew Conroy, West Bromwich Building Society financial controller said the existing reporting systems relied on a combination of general ledger data from its Agresso system and complex Microsoft Excel spreadsheet model-based analyses.

"We've experienced sustained and rapid growth over the last 10 years," he said. "But that has meant we've had to pull in data from different, disparate systems, which gives us a good top-level view of data. But we wanted the capability to drill down into the underlying data for more granular historical and current analysis, as well as to create more sophisticated 'what if' scenarios."

Conroy said TM1 was chosen because it offered the finance department the most competitive package, requiring the least amount of intervention from IT with its rapid data integration features. He also said that its Excel-based front end, secure web-based accessibility and ability to trace updates to the underlying through audit trails were key factors in the society's choice.

"IT only have to get involved in monitoring and managing the underlying infrastructure," he said. "And going forward, the only other involvement I think we'll need from IT is to point the re-built models to the underlying data tables in our Oracle data warehouse when they're ready in a couple of months time."

The society is hoping to start using the new financial models in TM1 by this summer and will run the Cognos software, with the help of Cognos integration partner ICit, alongside an existing Business Objects implementation that is used by other areas of the business.

"We will use the new system to create branch and product profitability models and ones also around resource planning and performance by channel, for example," said Conroy. "We're been able to do this to a certain extent, but with Cognos we want to drill down to full profits and loss statements.

"The business also wants to be able to look at the results and forecasts at much lower levels of granularity to be able to get the intelligence to micro-manage the business and answer questions it's been asking for while, like 'who are most profitable customers'."