Customer Solution Brief s2

Solution
Case Study
/ / Financial Services Firm Improves Productivity by 30% with Automation

"With the SharePoint solution in place, we have established an audit-proof centralized solution for managing our business critical credit files."

German financial services firm, Erste Abwicklungsanstalt was challenged with liquidating a 185 billion EUR financial asset portfolio without a centralized document storage system in place. adesso, a Business-Critical SharePoint partner, helped connect Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with an enterprise content management (ECM) archive-system, improving business processes, organization-wide productivity, and government compliance.

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Document published 06/08/03

Business Needs

Erste Abwicklungsanstalt (EAA) is an independent public legal entity in Germany, operating under the umbrella of the Financial Market Stabilization Authority (Bundesanstalt für Finanzmarktstabilisierung). Its task is to take over and wind up a European commercial bank’s assets and risk exposures with a goal of minimizing losses.

EAA employs 120 people at 3 locations and is responsible for the liquidation of a financial asset portfolio worth 185 billion EUR (approximately US$244 billion). They have been facing the challenge of how to manage this massive financial portfolio without a centralized document storage system in place?

The dominant collaboration method has been e-mail, which is person-dependent, error-prone, and manual. It is easy to ignore, delay, or forget about an e-mail, especially when the recipient is busy, traveling, or sick. For example when a credit decision had to be made, the customer requests a decision memo via e-mail from his service partner. The service partner manually collects the relevant documents, creates a decision memo, and sends the package via e-mail to their customer. Votes for the decision are collected – again via email – and then passed back to the service partner to carry out the order.

Solution

EAA selected adesso, a Business-Critical SharePoint partner to help resolve this challenge and improve processes, transparency, and compliance. What makes this solution business-critical is the ability to impact core business processes that are critical to the everyday running of the business. adesso established a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 integration with an ECM archive-system to take advantage of audit-proof versioning and archiving.

Benefits

While the ECM system brings the document management expertise to the table, SharePoint adds organization-wide visibility, improved processes, and compliance to the solution.

Company-Wide Transparency

With the SharePoint solution in place, all authorized players now have real-time visibility to all documents needed for the credit files, providing a single point of truth and including full-text search based on OCR capabilities. The use of e-mail and wait time for documents was significantly reduced, resulting in faster customer transactions.

Automation and Improved Productivity

A powerful metadata concept enhances productivity by facilitating search requests and providing the most appropriate documents to the respective audience. Process automation is estimated to increase productivity at least by 30%.

Better Cross-Company Decision-Making

The decision-making process has been generally accelerated by having a single point of truth for all documents and by facilitating the workflow based support. Its quality was improved by automatically documenting all votes and the changes to the necessary documents. Decision processes were modeled directly within the system with an automated workflow for collecting votes about credit decisions.

Timely SLAs

A reporting system was connected to measure service partner performance in providing documents against defined service level agreements (SLAs), which resulted in more timely execution.

Improved Compliance

Thanks to the audit-proof archiving solution, decisions and actions are automatically documented and tracked, improving governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). As a great accomplishment, now 100% of EAA credit decision processes are GRC-compliant.

Business-Critical SharePoint (BCSP) is a Microsoft partner program that includes top solution and service providers who focus on line-of-business (LOB) integration with SharePoint.