Project Overview

The project was implemented to meet the following challenges:

1. Design and implement a unified data warehouse based on the standard industrial model with a degree of customization up to 30 percent.
2. Implement the algorithms of data upload from the accounting systems of the bank and external sources to the corporate data warehouse in line with the methodology of managerial accounting. To provide a possibility of performing adjustments.
3. Implement the approaches of data cleansing and quality control, as well as business rule verification
4. Build theme–based data marts designed to analyze general ledger data, loan portfolio, managerial accounting, and performance of the network of self–service banking equipment
5. Implement a business glossary of banking terms
6. Develop more than 90 scheduled reports covering the tasks of management reporting and reporting to the parent company and regulators.

Solution

IBA is working as a part of the development team. The IBA responsibilities include requirement analysis; application design; database design, application development; unit, functional and system testing; quality assurance; and support.

The first ten stages of the project were finished on time with excellent references from the customer.

The eleventh stage, namely the enhancement of the application is currently underway.

Project Results

The application was deployed to production in line with the schedule. IBA received excellent references from the customer.

Challenge

Develop a mobile application for customers of the Eastern European Railway to view the schedules of international and commuter trains, buy tickets and obtain help information about services.

Solution highlights

The mobile application was being developed by two teams – Android and iOS. Work on the project lasted a year and a half. Approval of specifications, drafting of the terms of reference, and approval of the styling design took several months.

The IBA Group team participated in the coordination of the styling design for the mobile application: the visual style was to correspond to the unifying vision of a new website and mobile application, and the functionality that was requested by the customer. The application, like the ticket sale section of the website, runs on the basis of a new integration IT platform.

The previous version of the platform has been under development for over 10 years, so when introducing a new concept, the team was faced with multiple issues and improvements. The basic functionality of the mobile application includes viewing train schedules and buying tickets. The users may also view the online information board.

The list of routes provides information on the departure time, train number, the availability and cost of tickets; and a specific seat may be selected on the car diagram. To place any order, specify a personal identity document or mobile phone number (only for commuter trains). Payment for the order is available directly in the application by credit card. Online reservation is available.

When boarding the train with numbered seats, one needs to show the passenger car attendant only the document specified during reservation, and when boarding the train with unnumbered seats – a ticket on the smartphone screen.

All orders are retained in the user account: active, requiring activation (for commuter trains and municipal lines), as well as a full register of orders for the last year synchronized with the old website, and all tickets that have been refunded. The user account also provides opportunity to view selected routes and trains, the schedule by stations (including transfers), the train route, news and promotions, and help information.

Project results

Mobile app runs on Android and iOS. In the first month after launching the application, the platform recorded at least one million requests every day. Most of them are schedules of international and commuter trains.

Today, 2,000 tickets are sold through the mobile application daily. The plans of the IBA Group team include technical support and application development. In the next releases, new functionality will be added, for example, the ability to pay for bed-clothes in the application. The planning takes into account user feedback.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Monitor changes and activity of employees in the system during the implementation of production tasks on the SAP platform and increase the number of users.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

IBA Group arranged monitoring of the use of critical business transactions, roles and permissions of SAP users, created a register of transactions for analytical reporting and review of suspicious situations. We configured preventive control of certain transactions and processes with online warning of emerging threats. The solution notifies security officers of suspicious activity occurring in critical systems of the bank.

Result

The implemented system allowed automation of complex processes of bank information security and protection of SAP applications against attacks.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The customer requirement was to minimize the cost of migration to SAP S/4HANA for their distributed systems. Technical assessment is usually conducted before the migration for this purpose. It allows the customer to evaluate the amount of work for migration services, make up a list of improvements and draw up a project budget.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

Initially, the company’s IT-department planned to conduct a technical assessment on their own. After special programs and utilities have been launched, SAP administrators received a list of 17 000 errors. Due to the lack of competencies, the customer decided to hire a contractor. Among the main requirements was the knowledge of the German language and the ability to work on site in Germany.

The migration plan includes the conversion of nine distributed SAP systems into S/4HANA between 2020 and 2025. 40 person-days were allocated for the technical assessment. Using two out of nine customer’s systems as an example, experts from IBA Group estimated the upcoming migration and made recommendations for all project participants.

RESULTS

The customer has received documentation containing a range of work on the migration, a list of improvements and recommendations, budget forecast and project timelines.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

As-is process required extensive manual work to fill the forms in SAP, copy pasting data from 2 spreadsheet. There was a high risk of typos due to high volumes hence involved manual control to
comply to data quality and audits requirements.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

UiPath was selected as the vendor.

Repetitive tasks were automated using workflows prepared in UIPath studio. Robot could run by user reading certain folders for input data, extracting information to fill in SAP forms. Robot does also control on results, ie addendum contracts created, Web forms extracted and logs message with results.

This case also included the step required to convert Cyrillic text into Unicode via .NET snippet.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Customer employees should validate the tax amount charged in a vendor contract (tax rates vary for different groups of vendors and are defined in the customer’s database), then skype to extract human reference numbers.

Business tasks: to reduce amount of manual work, to train and support customer’s team to build automation for other SAP cases.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

UiPath was selected as the vendor.

1. Create an information extraction model, implement a predefined data storage with a list of vendors, and conduct an additional similarity check
2. Create a stamp detection model based on Tensorflow, Keras, and Open CV. Develop a script that locates a stamp in a document to help the business analytics team prepare a machine learning training set with 100 percent correctly marked data
3.  Create MS Access and Skype automation
4. Develop an automatic tool to decrypt documents online

Result

Bank receives email requests for cash transfer from one client’s account to another to pay off loans held with the bank. Transfer executed after validation. The main goal was a reduction of manual efforts, processing time and data consolidation.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

1. Time reduction on set-off operation execution: from 1 day to 10 minutes.
2. 90% process automation

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

• RPA bot compares data in different systems.
• Bank employees only need to update lists of debtors
• ChatBot consults clients on loans
• EmailBot sorts and classifies incoming emails

Business Challenge

The Customer requirement was to minimize the downtime of business applications and to enhance SLA compliance. The problem was that there was no single platform to organize the application support process. Due to inconsistent actions of the customer service, the downtime of applications (individual transactions) could have increased along with the discontent of business users.

In addition, it was necessary to provide a single source of knowledge to improve the quality of support and transfer knowledge to new employees. Unified knowledge of problem resolution history and architecture features was to be distributed among all stakeholders and not get lost.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

IBA Group has created a centralized platform for supporting various business applications running under z/OS. APPULSE monitors critical z/OS subsystems, including IMS, CICS, DB2, MQ, TWSz, and identifies the problem early on. Whereupon it notifies the responsible support engineers of such problem and automatically generates a ticket. The AI module offers a solution to the problem and predicts its success. You can run the solution, if it seems to be appropriate, directly from APPULSE. In the event of a new type of problem, the support engineer may address it directly from the program, thereby ensuring training of AI. Next time, APPULSE will offer this option to resolve problems of this or a similar type.

Results

Client reduced application downtime and ensured business continuity. A history of resolved problems accumulates, and a knowledge base is formed that is accessible to all stakeholders. Training for beginners is faster, leading to better and faster onboarding.

Advanced APPULSE interface, AI module and more efficient support processes make this job more attractive, so it has become easier for HR to fill vacancies.

Business challenge

Lifecell uses IBM Maximo as a centralized management system for network operation and development. IBM Maximo integrates and automates more than 30 business processes across radio network, transport network, network control, and network planning departments and serves more than 1,000 active users, with 120-160 users working simultaneously.

Based on the legacy Maximo 5.2 technology, the customer’s management system was unable to meet the new scalability, performance, and security needs. The main challenges included the following.

• The management system had roughly 100 custom applications and complicated business logic. No migration procedure was in place
• The legacy applications were poorly or not documented and the developers who initially performed the design and implementation were not available
• Certain parts of the business logic were implemented in the form of PL/SQL procedures
• The IBM Maximo management system is integrated with a number of external systems, including SAP (material transactions), Oracle IDM (user information and organizational structure), NetAct Planner (site and radio link information), HP Temip (Trouble Ticket Management and alarm information), and Nokia, and Ericsson OSS systems (automated site halting)
• According to the estimates, the migration process could take up to one year. Within this period, it was necessary to perform development and enhancement for the legacy applications and all applications were to stay up and running during the whole migration process.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

The Maximo migration started with a preparation stage that included a visit to the customer’s premises by IBA Group experts. Following the analysis of the requirements and estimation of the scope of work, IBA Group participated in a tender organized by the customer and won it.

The migration project was launched in March, 2015. The project team included IBM Certified Maximo specialists, Oracle DBA, business analysts, a QA specialist, and a technical writer.

The project was implemented in four stages and for every stage a subset of applications was selected, forming an application group. Each application group was migrated, switching the production from Maximo 5 to Maximo 7 for that group within one night. Within the migration process, data synchronization procedures were established to ensure data consistency between Maximo 5 and Maximo 7.

For every migrated application, the following scope of work was done:

• Reverse engineering to prepare the technical task document that describes the application’s design, database objects, business logic, UI, and all data dependencies
• Data migration and synchronization plan to document the data sources to be migrated and the data sources to be synchronized between Maximo 5 and Maximo 7, including all required data and structure transformation
• Application UI transformation from custom Maximo 5 jsp pages to Maximo 7 application XML markup, ensuring identical source UI layout and structure
• Business logic, including workflows and java customizations for Maximo 7
• Transformation of the existing PL/SQL procedures into Maximo cron tasks
• Data migration and transformation according to the data migration plan
• Report transformation to match the data structure modifications.

The following IBA-developed automation tools became a part of the Maximo development environment.

• Automated Maximo configuration management designed to create and update Maximo objects, including MBO, domains, and person groups based on the repository data
• Automated Maximo 5 application analysis to identify and document all data sources used by an application
• Automated transformation of Maximo 5 visual application forms into Maximo 7 application’s XML, preserving source layout.

With the enhanced development environment, the project team managed to deliver the second, third, and fourth application blocks with an 80 percent reduction in efforts as compared to the first application block.

Results

The project was completed successfully in December, 2016 with positive feedback from the customer. The upgraded management system is stable and meets strict security requirements. With the newly available platform features, especially REST API and Web Services, the system is deeper integrated into the corporate information system, meeting the growing requirements of business units.

Konstantin Zhylin, Head of Department for Telecommunication Systems Operation at Lifecell

“We would like to express our gratitude to IBA Group for the IBM MAXIMO Upgrade they implemented at Lifecell. Our teams worked hard for almost two years and successfully completed the project. It is safe to say that it was an exceptionally challenging project that is second to none with regard to the approaches and methodologies applied. I’d like to thank every participant of the project for the work performed. In addition, I would like to underscore an operational excellence of the team, their flexibility in problem solving, sociability, and customer–centric approach. As a result, it became possible to build up the processes of project management and successfully complete the migration of 80 applications to the new version of Maximo, conduct the training of users, and launch the new system. We are happy to recommend IBA Group as a reliable and proficient partner who is able to solve the most sophisticated problems to the best advantage.”

Challenge

The customer aimed to test feasibility of a cognitive automation technology for its business processes. The pilot business process consisted in validation of the tax amount charged in a vendor contract. Tax rates vary for different groups of vendors and are defined in the customer’s database.

Process Requirements

1. Achieve overall business process accuracy of 98 percent
2. Reduce manual time spent on one process by 50 percent
3. Train and support customer’s team to build automation for an SAP case.