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"Tidal Software brings a radically simple approach to optimizing the operations of one of your company's most complex assets: its enormous infrastructure of enterprise applications including SAP, Oracle, Informatica, Symantec/Veritas and many others."
Source : Tidal Software
ROI Case Study : Leading Online Bank
Leading Online Bank is also known as :
leading online bank,
online banking solution,
online bank application performance,
bank management,
banking asset management ,
online bank management,
management application online,
online bank automates ,
online banking software,
internet banking software,
bank process automation,
internet banking security,
internet banking system,
online banking management,
internet banking finance,
internet banking application.
CUSTOMER PROFILE
The company, who participated in the
study researched, has requested not
to be named due to their significant
presence in the banking sector. As a
global banking institution they maintain
a leadership position in their industry
segment due to the unique and
innovative products and services that
they offer.
- Industry: Financial
- Employees: Approximately 2,000
employees serving
North America
- Managed Assets: $50+ billion in 2006
TIDAL™ ENTERPRISE SCHEDULER PROVIDES ADVANCED AUTOMATION
AND STANDARDIZATION AT A LEADING ONLINE BANK, WHILE DELIVERING
A 114% ROI.
"The Tidal Enterprise Scheduler solution was simple and easy to
implement. For the online bank, we went into production in just
two months with one resource managing the deployment."
Online Bank IT Manager
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A leading global financial institution that
provides banking, asset management, and
a range of financial services to over 60
million private, corporate, and institutional
clients globally recently embarked on a new
strategy to leverage Internet technology and
deploy a direct-to-consumer online banking
model.
A distinctive advantage of the online
banking model is that it is open 24 hours a
day, seven days a week for its customers.
This, however, can pose a significant IT
challenge for the bank given the sizeable
transaction volumes and complex routing
requirements (e.g., funds transfers) that
must be processed daily. Largely, these
processing requirements are managed
through batch process scripts that run
during low activity times, usually overnight,
due to the enormous processing power
they require.
The tremendous growth of the bank's
online business was translating into
increased batch job run times and
increased complexities of script
management. The bank's online IT team
was faced with two major hurdles that
were impacting the bank's growth. The
?rst was to improve upon their traditional
batch job management processes that
were highly manual. These processes were
manually initiated and provided only basic
error identification capabilities. Therefore
if a script ran incorrectly, an error could
remain unnoticed for hours. In addition, IT
personnel needed to communicate across
shifts to manage hand-offs when jobs ran
for long periods of time. The manual and
serial nature of the scripts often led to
delays that, for a company experiencing
hyper-growth like that experienced by
the bank's online division, quickly extend
beyond the capacity of their overnight
processing window.
A second factor impacting the bank's
online IT operations was the inefficiency
in creating and maintaining the scripts
themselves. The manual ad hoc process,
by which the scripts were created and
maintained did not enforce consistent
coding standards, the scripts were not
documented sufficiently and did not include
detailed error and exception handling.
For example, rather than using separate
resource files, the scripts contained
embedded variables and parameters.
Errors, once found, proved very difficult to
troubleshoot and recover from given the
non-standardized development approach.
In April 2006, the bank's online business
unit turned to Tidal Software for a solution
to their batch job challenges. Using Tidal™
Enterprise Scheduler, they were able to
reinvent their batch management practices
saving time and money while improving IT
performance. Leveraging the sophisticated,
consistent, and powerful functionality of
Tidal's solution, the bank's online division
is now able to run sophisticated automated
batch jobs that check for data integrity, the
interdependencies of scripts, automatically
detect and correct errors, and gather
statistics on performance.
On a total cost of ownership investment
estimate of $1.3 Million, the bank's online
division realized a conservatively estimated
52% Internal Rate of Return, a 114% five-year
ROI, and an investment payback in 26
months. Moreover, given the success of this
solution, the bank's online division is in the
process of rolling the Tidal™ Enterprise
Scheduler solution out to their divisions
globally.
CUSTOMER PROFILE
The global financial institution offers
banking, and asset management to over 60
million private, corporate, and institutional
customers. It has become a market leader in
online banking managing nearly $70 billion
in assets and growing at approximately $1
billion in managed assets per month.
THE CHALLENGE:
The bank's online division knew that, with
the tremendous rate of growth of their
customer base, the efficiency of their job
processes would only become more crucial
in delivering a world-class online customer
experience.
The scripts and management processes at
the bank's online division were problematic
for several reasons:
- Manual job management requirements
caused delays and increased the
possibility for human error.
- Non-standard methods of coding scripts
led to difficulties in finding and correcting
errors. Specialized knowledge of the
structure of each script was required to
effectively troubleshoot problems.
- Specialized knowledge of the scripts
required that any updates, maintenance
or general coding support be provided
by local resources with speci?c domain
knowledge. The scripts could not be
centralized and run by one organization
in one location.
- Lack of visibility into the control logic
embedded into scripts compounded
troubleshooting efforts and made
changes difficult.
- Poor error checking led to mistakes
being discovered much later in the
job cycle increasing the amount of
research required to identify the source
of the problem and re-run the process
successfully.<:li>
The bank's online division realized that
replacing its ad-hoc, manual processes
with an automated and centralized job
management solution was required to
meet their growth and customer service
objectives. The company turned to Tidal
Software to provide that leading solution.
THE TIDAL SOFTWARE SOLUTION:
In April of 2006, the online bank began
working with Tidal Software to implement
a new job management solution. The
simplicity of the Tidal™ Enterprise
Scheduler solution proved to be a key
element to the online bank's success. After
an initial discovery phase of 1.5 months, the
solution took a single IT resource only two
months to set up, implement, and deploy.
After the Tidal™ Enterprise Scheduler
solution was deployed, the online bank's
benefits were immediate:
- Centralization of batch job operations
was achieved through Tidal's Command
Center GUI interface. Batch jobs can
now be run efficiently with a dramatically
reduced possibility of error.
- The advanced automation provided by
Enterpriser Scheduler has allowed for
greater volume of job processing to be
managed by fewer personnel.
- Automated triggering of synchronous
batch processes has lead to a much
greater opportunity for the online bank
to complete jobs within the allocated
processing windows.
- Sophisticated error handling and
checking has significantly reduced the IT
administrative effort.
- Standardization of the batch job
programming used in Tidal™ Enterprise
Scheduler makes errors easier to avoid,
detect, and correct. The solution's ability
to separate resource-file programming
elements from the job script make
runtime errors much easier to locate,
understand, and correct.
- Tidal™ Enterprise Scheduler's ability to
measure batch job performance allows
IT personnel to identify bottlenecks and
trends to better optimize IT resources to
maximize efficiencies.
QUANTIFIED BUSINESS BENEFITS:
The entire solution was rolled out in
just under two months with a total cost
of ownership of $1.3 Million. The
conservative estimate is that the solution
will pay for itself in just over two years
(26 months) and provide a 114% ROI over
5 years.
The efficiency of the Tidal™ Enterprise
Scheduler solution has led to an initial la-
bor savings of approximately 300 hours a
week by centralizing the work of the bank's
online division's three IT departments
managing the batch jobs. This reduction in
administrative effort has allowed the online
bank's IT personnel to focus more time on
tuning the job processes and on performing
other value-add activities rather than
remaining trapped in maintenance mode.
Overall efficiency of the major job
administration tasks have improved
significantly, due to the consistency and
sophistication of the Tidal™ Enterprise
Scheduler solution. In 2006, the online
bank's development time of new scripts
improved by 50%, job execution by 97%,
and debugging by 83%.
Moreover, the solution has led to an
estimated 21% annual labor savings in the
IT Command Center, or $400,000, in the
form of 0.5 management personnel and
2.5 IT administrator personnel through
reduced time to embed job management
parameters into scripts, reduced time to
monitor and run scripts, and reduced time
to debug script errors.
Beyond the current ROI numbers,
the online bank is positioned to reap
additional benefits.
The Tidal™ Enterprise Scheduler solution is
only about 50% deployed within the online
bank's IT Command Center. The solution is
now the standard platform for development
of all new job scheduling projects and all
legacy jobs are targeted for migration. The
ROI benefit of this further deployment has
not yet been estimated or included in our
benefits analysis.
The greatest qualitative benefits of the
solution might be in the area of low cost
customer services delivery. Implementing
a solution that can accommodate
tremendous business growth, while
allowing IT personnel to focus on
operational efficiencies, is critical to the
online bank's success. Calculating the
business impact of replacing their legacy
batch processes with Tidal™ Enterprise
Scheduler - an efficient, well-designed,
consistent solution - is difficult. But in a
highly competitive marketplace, low cost
delivery enables the online bank to offer the
highest yield rates to their customers, fuel-
ing new accounts and more assets under
management. Another intangible derived
from implementing Enterprise Scheduler is
the delay of additional hardware purchases
through more efficient processing.
ABOUT THIS CASE STUDY
Research and analysis for this study
was conducted by Mainstay Partners,
an independent consulting ?rm that
has performed over 200 studies for
leading information technology providers
including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Dell, HP,
BearingPoint, EMC, Network Appliance,
EDS and Tidal Software. This case study
was based on interviews with the online
bank's executives, IT Managers and
Operations personnel, review of project
planning documents, and searches of
industry literature. ROI calculations use
industry standard assumptions regarding
the time value of money.
Information contained in the publication
has been obtained from sources
considered reliable, but is not warranted
by Mainstay Partners.