Automation of Procurement and Contracting Processes of the Bank

Background

Previously, the bank did not use systems to automate the accounting of procurement processes. The documents were prepared in hard copies which were considered/approved at the meetings of the working groups. All documents were stored in folders, employees also made their electronic copies.

Main problems that the bank wanted to address:

• lack of a central repository of all documents related to procurement processes;
• lack of transparency in procurement processes;
• long lead times for the procurement of goods and services;
• lack of reporting on procurement processes and their efficiency;
• lack of budget expenditure reports.

Business Challenge

The Bank submitted a request to automate the accounting of procurement and contracting in the context of its business activities. The new system was supposed to be the last in the trio of applications that were developed at different times. First two applications:

• EDW: Enterprise Data Warehouse and reporting system based on IBM Cognos;
• ABFPS: Automated Budgeting and Financial Planning System.

It was necessary to create a unified accounting system for all documents related to the procurement of goods and services, with their subsequent approval and supervision over the execution of expenses budget. Upon conclusion of the contract, keep records of primary accounting documents and monitor payments. The system was to be built on the basis of the bank’s existing infrastructure based on IBM products (DB2, FileNet, WebSphere, Integration Bus) and integrated with the personnel records system, budgeting system, Enterprise Storage, and the bank’s operating system.

Solution

The IBA Group team has developed a bank business management system based on the terms of reference elaborated jointly with the customer. The system has a client side for working from a browser and a server side for business logic. The approval of documents was organized through a dedicated business process management system. An enterprise service bus was used to integrate with related systems of the bank. All documents created within the system are stored in the document storage powered by FileNet.

Result

A unified system of accounting for all documents in the process of purchasing goods and services has been created. Now all documents are approved in a single system with the ability to access information about the document itself and its approval route. During document approval, the available free budgets for procurement are monitored. Business is able to generate a variety of reports on the procurement processes and execution of expenses budgets. A unified catalog of purchased goods and services has also been created. For all contracts, documents on contractual performance and payments made are available together the capability of automatic payments.

The system has been in commercial operation since January 2019. During this period, about 95,000 documents were created. Now the project is in the support and development stage.