Customers

AIB Group

AIB Group logo"BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management will help us capture all the information regarding the activities of tellers, the call center, and the back-office. This will provide a unified view of the cost of running our business—giving us advanced intelligence about the organization and the ability to make more informed decisions."

Anne McComish
Senior Accountant
Allied Irish Bank

Challenge

Allied Irish Bank (AIB) Group is Ireland's leading banking and financial services organization. It operates principally in Ireland, Britain, the U.S., and Poland-and employs more than 22,000 people worldwide, in more than 750 offices.

As an existing customer of Business Objects, an SAP company, AIB had implemented the Metify ABM (activity-based management) solution in its central finance and leasing department. To further improve efficiency and enhance customer service, AIB decided that it wanted greater insight into product and customer profitability. So it upgraded to Business Objects web-based, activity-based costing solution—the BusinessObjects™ Profitability and Cost Management application.

The Metify ABM solution provided AIB cost managers with detailed unit cost information by product, customer, and channel. However, they needed a solution that could simplify the processes and provide managers with an end-to-end activity-based costing (ABC) model. Anne McComish, senior accountant at AIB, explains: "Although the benefits of running ABC models is well worth the effort, we still found gathering data from over 10 contributors time-consuming and difficult to manage."

Approach

Business Objects Web-based, activity-based management solution, Activity Analysis, was selected for the project because it satisfied AIB's selection criteria:

  • Flexibility to manipulate costing information based on the requirement for information, with little effort
  • A powerful calculation engine with a predefined set of logic rules so models could be built quicker
  • Web-based solutions that gathered and delivered information quicker and more accurately
  • Ease of use: anyone who understood the principles of ABC could easily use Activity Analysis, given some basic training

In addition, AIB valued the level of services and support provided from its previous Metify ABM implementation.

Results

BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management has been rolled out in AIB’s money transmission and lending facilities, providing greater granularity in costs for a range of activities—from processing checks to managing personal loan applications. The application provides the ability to measure and analyze direct, indirect, fixed, variable, and allocated costs, using a single model.

"The driver information," says McComish, "will be sourced from the data warehouse to feed into our model and produce unit costs for all customer-facing transactions. By feeding these unit costs back into a data warehouse table, we can attach the cost to a customer or product. The data warehouse also holds income by customer and product, which—combined with the cost information—gives us the ability to analyze both customer and product profitability."

In addition to providing managers with information to better manage product and customer profitability in the future, BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management has identified a number of business processes that have consequently been reengineered. This has resulted in cost savings that McComish reports is justifying the cost of purchasing the software and consulting, and the effort that has gone into this project.

In the future, McComish expects the application to play a more strategic role in improving the understanding of unit costs across the business, from branch banking to credit-card services. "BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management will help us capture all the information regarding the activities of tellers, the call center, and the back-office," says McComish. "This will provide a unified view of the cost of running our business—giving us advanced intelligence about the organization and the ability to make more informed decisions."

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