Section 12.4. ESA in action: Zuger Kantonalbank

12.4. ESA in action: Zuger Kantonalbank

Composites can dramatically improve user productivity and reduce errors. This was the focus of consulting firm CSC's creation of a highly simplified and guided composite to help Zuger Kantonalbank's personnel achieve maximum productivity with a minimum of effort.

Zuger Kantonalbank is the leading bank in the Swiss Canton of Zug and plays an important role in the region's day-to-day business. With 2004 revenues of 333 million euros and more than 400 employees, the bank is one of the largest employers in the region. Although small by international standards, Zuger Kantonalbank offers a range of banking services, including mortgage lending, electronic banking, and corporate finance; manages total assets of more than $6 billion; and handles approximately 115,000 customers in a given year. Considering the size of its staff and the scope of its operations, the bank is constantly looking to improve employee productivity.

To that end, the bank asked the consulting firm CSC to create an interface solution that would integrate all of the relevant processes involved in maintaining customer accounts and creating new ones. Before it could tackle the technical challenges, however, CSC had to resolve and balance the competing needs of employees with different roles, responsibilities, and training across the organization. Each group seemingly had its own limited window of functionality, whether it was a branch's financial advisor struggling to open new accounts or a back-office power user managing the life cycles of those accounts. New employees introduced to the bank's ad hoc collection of portal functionality regularly made errors while entering data and overall productivity was depressed by the amount of time employees spent in the back of branches battling interfaces instead of up front working with customers.

CSC's mission, then, was to create a new portal and composite application that could abstract the functionality underlying all of its previous interfaces and reconstitute it in the form of a streamlined set of business processes. A handful of role profiles would assign the appropriate functionality and complexity to each user, so the back-office experts would have the wide latitude they required and the productivity of new hires would be increased by processes automated using guided procedures designed to walk them through activities and keep errors to a minimum. Beyond the interface issues, the portal would help the bank standardize and automate its usual business processes, provide support for regulatory compliance issues, identify errors and duplicate data, reduce the integration gaps between the underlying enterprise applications, and generally provide a more modern and efficient solution on behalf of its employees.

CSC chose SAP NetWeaver and its SAP NetWeaver Portal component as the integration platform and portal environment, respectively, for its enterprise services-based approach. Zuger Kantonalbank had previously installed mySAP Banking as its ERP solution, and this became the source of many services called by CSC's composite application.

CSC's solution effectively wrapped functionality summoned from the SAP enterprise applications (via enterprise services invoked by ABAP calls) within a loosely coupled, highly reusable composite application that had an additional layer of interface design on top that was unique to Zuger Kantonalbank. The loose coupling between layers meant that the bank could flexibly redesign the workflow within the portal whenever and however business conditions required. It also meant that CSC could offer its composite application as a service to its midsize banking clients in Switzerland.