BMO Bank of Montreal Slices Costs, Time With Web-Based Reporting

Snapshot

Organization BMO Financial Group serves clients across Canada and in the United States through its Canadian retail arm BMO Bank of Montreal, BMO Nesbitt Burns, and Harris Bank.

The Challenge Business analysts and managers spent much of their time wading through paper reports to collect and rekey information. The bank needed to give managers more timely data and better access to information.

The Strategy Develop a Web-based system that can deliver reports over the bank's intranet at lower cost and greater speed.

The Results Analysts can now drill down in seconds to a single branch, freeing up hundreds of hours to work with customers and analyze data. The bank identifies problems more quickly and responds proactively to opportunities. Development costs were minimal, requiring only one programmer.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS.

"Build it and they will come" is every engineer's dream, often unrealized. But it could be applied to the Bank of Montreal's Web Monthly Progress Monitor (WebMPM), an information console that has become a key application for the bank's management.

Prototyped in a mere two weeks by John Veltkamp, responsible for Systems Programming and Design in the Bank's Technology and Solutions Group, the WebMPM was put into production a week later. Since then, one manager after another has discovered the application, adopted it, and promoted it to colleagues.

"A thirst for knowledge was not being met," says Veltkamp. "We were able to roll out WebMPM one by one. It became a word-of-mouth deployment: One person had it and benefited from it, so the next person wanted it too."

Reusing Code

This was supposed to be hard. The bank was exploring ways to deliver information to managers electronically, and all of the proposed solutions had high price tags. But Veltkamp built the first demo of WebMPM in one weekend, and the demo persuaded skeptical managers to proceed with further development.

The secrets to WebMPM's rapid development: reuse existing code and Web development software that taps directly into the bank's mainframe databases. By using WebFOCUS from Information Builders, Veltkamp was able to take advantage of existing code written for the bank's mainframe in Information Builders' FOCUS fourth-generation programming language. Built on a similar foundation, WebFOCUS can execute the code with little or no modification.

WebFOCUS also has the ability to directly access dozens of different mainframe databases. That cut out an entire, complex layer of data management and coding, further streamlining development. Among other things, data security was assured, because security profiles on the mainframe automatically carry over to the WebFOCUS interface.

Fast Returns

Although its development time matches that of a relatively modest project, WebMPM is having a major impact on the Bank of Montreal's business. Before WebFOCUS, the bank's Monthly Progress Monitor was a mainframe system that generated reports from branches across Canada. The finance department would review the numbers at the end of each month and about 10 days later, 6-inch-thick paper reports with balance sheets, income statements, and other reports would start to roll off the printer.

Performance data for each branch would be mailed or couriered to the branch manager, while district managers would try to cull data from bundles of reports for further analysis and comparison. Those results would be available 15-20 days after the end of the previous month and often required managers to manually input data from paper reports into spreadsheets or call bank headquarters to get additional information that wasn't in their reports.

WebMPM dramatically sped up the process. The finance department signs off as before – and about 10 minutes later, bank managers can begin looking at their data.

The time savings are considerable. The most important return on the bank's investment, says Mel Rosenfeld, the business designer, is the hundreds of hours each month that analysts and managers now spend working with customers or analyzing high-level data, rather than manipulating data contained in stacks of reports. WebMPM will pay off even more in the long run, as the bank turns better and faster data into improved decisions. Executives can see the results of new initiatives much earlier and can respond more quickly to opportunities and challenges.

"In the past, if something occurred that affected the Bank of Montreal's business, it could take weeks before we realized it," says Rosenfeld. Now metrics and drill-downs are a click away. Managers can view high-level national or regional summaries, yet drill down to individual branches quickly.

Managers Buying In

While many new IT projects face an uphill battle as users measure comfortable old ways of doing business against new high-tech solutions, WebMPM has spread by word of mouth, as one user after another recognized its value and began taking advantage of its power.

The point-and-click interface minimizes user training, and users get accustomed to the system so quickly that within a few days many are asking for even more information. Fortunately, the speed that characterized the system's original development lives on: In many cases, Veltkamp can deliver a new report within a day of getting a request, which has paid additional dividends in users' attitudes toward the system.

"The target audience has really embraced the technology," says Veltkamp. "When their information is incorporated and deployed quickly, they feel that it is their application and that it has been built with a focus on what they really need to do their job."

That turned users into advocates of the system and ensured that it got the resources it needed to grow. The product was quickly rolled out to about 12 managers and rapidly grew to more than 100.

The WebMPM uses a straightforward architecture. It runs on a UNIX server with direct mainframe access.

Today WebMPM is considered a success, not only by managers at the bank but also by the IT community at large. It received the 2002 Computerworld Honors medal in being one of the top applications in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate category.

Established in 1988, the Computerworld Honors Program is dedicated to identifying the men and women and organizations and institutions that are leading the global information-technology revolution and to recording the impact of their achievements on society.

Freedom to Imagine

With many of the bottlenecks removed between managers and information, the Bank of Montreal now has the freedom to imagine doing things that seemed impossible before. The system is currently one-way, giving users access to mainframe data, but not the ability to enter more. The bank is now exploring opportunities to use the system to enter certain types of data.

More important, WebMPM has begun to change the way the entire bank thinks about disseminating information.

"Using the Web to deliver information has begun a process," says Veltkamp. "The delivery of information is being standardized to one common tool. This is very powerful and allows a freer flow of information to individuals who really need it. WebMPM is pioneering an 'information portal' at which users will obtain a myriad of information necessary for optimal performance."