Brief history
Atruvia (formerly Fiducia & GAD IT AG) is the service provider for information technology within the cooperative financial group. The company currently employs almost 6,400 people in the group, who together generate an annual group turnover of around 1.4 billion euros. Fiducia & GAD’s customers include all 1,000 Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken in Germany, the companies of the cooperative financial group as well as numerous private banks and companies from other sectors. Fiducia & GAD manages more than 173,000 banking workstations, administers almost 83 million customer accounts and ensures a smooth cash supply nationwide with over 36,000 of its own self-service machines.
“We already knew synvert as a competent consulting partner from previous projects. Thanks to the excellent technical and project management skills of the synvert saracus consultants, all the objectives of this demanding customer and project were successfully achieved within the allocated budget. The long-term cooperation is proof of the successful support and collaboration.”
Goals & challenges
As part of the project, a new reporting environment was developed for a customer of Fiducia & GAD. The primary objective was the necessary replacement of the customer's own software development by integrating it into the established BI landscape of Fiducia & GAD
Requirements
The following key requirements were placed on the new reporting environment:
- Integration of specialized software for problem loan management
- Replacement of in-house developments with BaFin-compliant standard products and procedures
- Development of an analysis room for internal standard reporting and ad hoc analyses
- Development of customized reporting that allows interactive analyses of the managed loan portfolio and can be sent out
- Establishment of efficient and maintenance-friendly production processes for the provision of monthly internal and external reporting
Key points
Before the project, reporting was based on a software solution developed in-house. This resulted in the following focal points for the project:</p
- Compliance with regulatory requirements
- Integrated data storage and management across the source systems
- Automated reporting for customers
Architecture
The data warehouse follows a classic, two-layer core-mart architecture. The system collects the relevant information from the various source systems, cleans it according to defined rules, prepares it in terms of data technology and stores it in a central data pool. The core warehouse is operated with DB2 z/OS on a mainframe environment and is updated daily using batch jobs from the source systems. The mart layer, which uses DB2 LUW under Unix, is managed with Sagent Data Flow. Various control tables, which are maintained by the customer using Apparo Fast Edit, can be used to influence the processing logic of the mart supply. For example, sales can be dynamically assigned to a series of key figures based on selected characteristics (contra account, purpose, etc.). The various components and jobs in the backend are scheduled using Automic. The frontend essentially consists of the Cognos components Framwork Manager, Connection and Report Studio. The relational reports are based on the package also used for ad hoc analyses. An innovation for both the customer and Fiducia & GAD was the first-time use of Cognos ActiveReports.
Generated benefits
The BI solution developed provides the following benefits:
- Fulfillment of legal requirements
- Standardized, user-friendly and highly flexible front end through the use of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
- Thanks to parameterized ETL routes and Apparo Fast Edit, technical changes can be imported autonomously by the customer
- The Active Reports enable the bank’s customers to analyze their loan portfolio interactively and navigate flexibly through their data.
Services accomplished by synvert
As a competent partner, synvert provided the following services:
- Sub-project management and implementation of analysis workshops at the customer’s premises
- Creation of functional specifications and detailed technical concepts for implementation
- Modeling the data layer of the data mart (daily updated, monthly historicized)
- Implementation of ETL processes to supply the mart with data from the core DWH
- Creation of Apparo Fast Edit dialogs for the parameterization of ETL routes
- Conception and implementation of the Cognos Framework Manager model, relational standard reports and highly complex Active Reports
- Technical tests of all components created and support for the customer during the acceptance test and commissioning of the overall solution
Delivery / conclusion
By replacing the customer's own software development and integrating it into Fiducia & GAD's existing BI platform, a BaFin-compliant, standardized, state-of-the-art BI solution was created. The well-founded experience in the conception and implementation of BI solutions has made synvert a valuable consulting and integration partner for Fiducia & GAD. In addition to the project presented here, synvert has been supporting Fiducia & GAD as a long-standing partner in various other projects and in the maintenance of the solutions created.
