Financial Services Industry Case Study
/ / Florida Bank Simplifies Collaboration Solution Deployment with Licensing Agreement
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Banking
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, BankAtlantic has more than 82 retail outlets and more than 250 ATM machines. BankAtlantic is open seven days a week. It has more than 2,400 employees and 1,800 desktops.
Business Situation
BankAtlantic sought to automate manual workflows and provide a robust document management and collaborative solution—while streamlining software acquisition, management, and deployment.
Solution
BankAtlantic renewed its Microsoft® Enterprise Agreement and added Microsoft collaboration technologies to support document archiving, retrieval, and business process automation.
Benefits
n Enabled predictable annual software payments
n Saved money on training
n Saved 50 percent time and labor with automated workflow
n Created intelligent portal for policy management / “Microsoft licensing agreements are among the easiest to administer. That, and the benefits of our collaboration and communication solution, adds up to a great value proposition.”
Jim Trautwein, Chief Information Officer, BankAtlantic
Based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, BankAtlantic provides convenient customer service, with longer than usual banking hours. Yet, manual business processes and inefficient policy and procedure document management impeded staffers’ productivity and ability to keep up with growth and customer demands. BankAtlantic renewed its Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft to simplify and save money on the acquisition and deployment of a Microsoft® business process automation and employee collaboration solution. Now all staff members use an intelligent, searchable policy and procedure document management portal to fulfil their information needs and to create online sites for teamwork. Automated workflows take half the time and staff than were previously required. Empowered with self-serve access to information and freed of unproductive work, BankAtlantic employees are now working more efficiently.
Situation
More than 50 years ago, BankAtlantic began with the opening of a single office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A commitment to convenient customer service and community involvement has fueled BankAtlantic’s growth so that today, with 82 stores, it is one of the largest financial institutions headquartered in Florida. Serving both personal and business customers with a full range of individual, small business, and commercial banking products and services, BankAtlantic is open seven days a week, with several stores open until midnight. Customers can also take advantage of online banking services; cash management services; a customer service center that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week; automated telephone banking; and an extensive network of more than 250 ATMs.
BankAtlantic executives know that good customer service is directly linked to internal efficiency. However, many of the 55-year-old institution’s processes had not kept pace with growing expectations of customers used to the Internet and automated banking machines. “We are still performing a lot of manual work,” explains Jim Trautwein, Chief Information Officer at BankAtlantic. “Our goal is to improve employee productivity and organizational efficiency by automating many of our internal business processes and improving communication and collaboration among staff groups dispersed throughout our stores. As we become more efficient, our customers will enjoy even more responsive service.”
The judicious acquisition of technologies designed to empower bank employees is a key element of the bank’s strategy to boost internal efficiencies. “Banks are notorious for being process-oriented institutions. So we see value in technology that provides user-friendly solutions to bring manual processes online, such as a powerful framework for archiving, sharing, and accessing documents to enable more connected, productive teamwork,” Trautwein comments.
For example, BankAtlantic had a policy publication and tracking system that did not supply enough document archiving, search, and storage functionality to warrant the maintenance it demanded of the bank’s 100-member IT department. Bank employees rely on hundreds of policies and procedures to perform daily functions that range from check cashing, loan approvals, opening an account, defining authority limits for transactions, and mortgage approvals.
“Banks rely on strong policies and documented procedures to protect themselves and their customers, and to demonstrate that they are in compliance with industry regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the U.S. Patriot Act,” explains Trautwein. “Our old system had the capability to tag documents as required reading for a certain audience and then to track and confirm who had read it, but we found the user interface to be cumbersome. When staffers entered a keyword to search the database, the system often came up with nothing, even though we knew the document resided there. We wanted to empower our employees with simple tools that help them find the information they need, and to work more productively with their colleagues—without getting store support or IT involved.”
In other instances, BankAtlantic simply didn’t have the technology in place to help improve individuals’ productivity. For example, the manual process of ensuring flood certification on homes used as collateral for a loan took more than a week, with files shuffled between the insurance validation company that works with BankAtlantic, and its customers and loan insurance department. “Our goal to automate business process focuses on increasing our staff’s efficiency,” explains Trautwein. “If we can free employees from manual processes, they can devote more time to our customers.”
For a bank that Trautwein describes as more closely resembling a retail environment than a traditional financial institution, customer service is paramount to keeping BankAtlantic’s competitive edge. BankAtlantic is known as Florida’s Most Convenient Bank, and Trautwein wanted technology solutions to help keep it that way.
Solution
“We turned to Microsoft® products because they form an integrated environment that we can tailor to meet our communication and collaboration needs to improve productivity,” notes Trautwein. “And with the Microsoft Office applications that are XML-enabled, we can create client solutions that automate business processes by sharing data with our different systems.”
So when BankAtlantic renewed its Enterprise Agreement with the Microsoft Volume Licensing Program two and a half years ago, it acquired the Windows® XP Professional operating system and Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003. The bank also acquired several Microsoft servers, including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004, and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server. The company already had Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 and simply rolled that over into its new Enterprise Agreement. BankAtlantic also upgraded to the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system under a Select License program, which provides a volume price solution through a single one-time purchase.
“Through the Enterprise Agreement, we acquired a number of new technologies to increase organizational efficiencies and automate business processes,” says Trautwein. “This was a cost-effective way to build on previous technology investments.”
Under the Enterprise Agreement, BankAtlantic worked closely with its Microsoft account team to determine the most advantageous acquisition strategy for each product. “That’s how we came up with the idea of purchasing Windows Server 2003 under the Select License agreement,” he recalls. “We looked at the timing of the next release and a Select License made more sense. The licensing specialist was most helpful in ensuring we got the best value for our money.”
Along with amortization of payments over three years, BankAtlantic’s Enterprise Agreement provides a predictable annual price per personal computer for enterprise software products, improved control over software costs, and better budget planning.
BankAtlantic also took advantage of training and consulting credits that came along with its Enterprise Agreement under its Software Assurance benefits to expedite and streamline deployment of its new collaborative technologies. “Microsoft Services was extremely helpful in providing a gap analysis and roadmap for deploying SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which we had slated as the number one priority to replace our policy tracking and publication solution,” recalls Trautwein. “We benefited from a number of pre-sales engineers that talked to us about the integration of the technologies and the prerequisites that each required—most importantly Active Directory® [directory service] for security administration. Microsoft Services ensured we installed the products in the right order and saved us from the pain of having to redeploy SharePoint Portal Server.”
More than half of BankAtlantic’s development staff took advantage of training credits that come along with the Enterprise Agreement to ramp up on the new technologies the company acquired, including working with BizTalk Server 2004, and programming within the Microsoft .NET Framework. BizTalk Server 2004 helps to create business processes that unite separate applications into a streamlined workflow, and it offers document routing and a rules-based tracking infrastructure that integrates business processes across the enterprise and with partners and customers.
“Thanks to the training credits that we redeemed with a local Microsoft Learning Solution Partner, we were able to do all the analysis design and programming in SharePoint Portal Server for the new application to replace our previous solution—without having to go back to management for more money,” adds Trautwein.
BankAtlantic’s new policy documentation management solution, dubbed PolicyLink, went live in 2005 with all the prerequisite technologies in place, for example, Active Directory and Exchange Server 2003, and is currently used daily by 100 percent of the bank’s employees. Not only does SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provide all the document versioning and management functionality that BankAtlantic requires, but the product is flexible enough to customize to BankAtlantic’s specific needs. “We were able to recreate the capability of delivering designated, must-read policies to all employees or selected audiences, and to ensure recipients acknowledge receipt and review of the document,” explains Trautwein.
Meanwhile, a new BizTalk Server 2004 solution that automates the flood certification process was prototyped in 2005. “We are just beginning to develop more BizTalk Server–hosted applications that take the paper out of our workflow,” comments Trautwein. “So far we have taken important first steps in improving internal efficiencies by designing a sophisticated Microsoft infrastructure for building and maintaining collaborative browser-based workspaces and automating business processes to increase organization efficiency.”
Benefits
BankAtlantic is benefiting from its new Microsoft solution with products that work together to integrate employees across its stores and to link business processes from the front office to the back office—ensuring that BankAtlantic is a more cohesive, productive organization. “Our goal to boost internal efficiencies is made easier by technologies that enhance the flow of information from the front office to the back office and across all stores,” explains Trautwein. “Microsoft technologies are a key enabler for achieving our ‘self-service’ strategy when it comes to our employees. We were looking for technology to empower our employees to work more efficiently and independently, and Microsoft provides that.”
For example, the automated flood certification workflow quickly and simply initiates and finalizes the necessary documents for each loan, with BizTalk Server reaching out electronically to take over the rest of the tasks: automating the process of requesting information from the customer, verifying with the insurance company, and updating BankAtlantic’s records to ensure each loan has appropriate insurance. “BizTalk [Server] takes the extra steps out of this process, cutting the service time and human resource requirements in half,” enthuses Trautwein. “We are also using BizTalk to push new account information to our databases in real time, so we have a better understanding of sales activities across the stores every day.”
And since deployment a year ago, BankAtlantic employees have come to rely on the SharePoint Portal Server 2003–based PolicyLink document repository for all their information needs. “SharePoint Portal Server is the environment where all our employees, if they have a question, go to find an answer,” advises Trautwein. “To a large extent, it’s becoming our corporate knowledge base and with its robust search engine, people are finding what they need to know when they need to know it. PolicyLink is also the way we track compliance with policy and procedures, helping us to remain in step with industry regulations.”
As staffers become more familiar with the new enterprise portal solution, they are beginning to use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to share information generated by individuals and teams in different departments that have created Windows SharePoint Services–based Web sites. Windows SharePoint Services–based Web sites are a key piece of information worker infrastructure delivered in Windows Server 2003 that promote online team collaboration. The SharePoint sites reside on SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which acts as a framework that connects the people that are using the sites and the information contained within them, across the organization.
“We are striving towards an environment where the IT department doesn’t have to get involved with every new site,” explains Trautwein. “We are developing standard templates for new projects so team members are empowered to create new Web sites. That’s where the documents will reside and where members can easily communicate with each other through an interface with Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 [messaging and collaboration client] that facilities sharing calendars and sending e-mail pertaining to group activities.”
BankAtlantic’s Enterprise Agreement also contributed to the solution’s success through ensuring that the company standardized on the latest desktop operating system and productivity suite, as well as the latest database engine. Through Software Assurance, BankAtlantic is assured of new version upgrades for each product licensed under the Enterprise Agreement. Not only does this simplify software asset management and reduce costs, it also increases the value of the products themselves. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is optimized to run on the latest Microsoft database, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office 2003.
“It was very important that everyone standardized on Office 2003 to ensure that we could properly share documents throughout the organization when we installed SharePoint Portal Server,” explains Trautwein. “We needed all departments to be on the same version so they could share policies and procedures without worrying about versions and problems opening documents. In this case, the new version upgrade we were entitled to not only saved us money, but also increased the effectiveness of our SharePoint Portal Server solution.”
And to help its various staff groups make the most out of their new Office productivity suite, BankAtlantic employed Microsoft Training Libraries, made available under its Enterprise Agreement, to provide computer-based training to employees via its intranet. Microsoft training content also provided the basis for curricula for BankAtlantic’s university courses on Microsoft Office 2003.