Source: Computerworld, http://computerworld.hu, December 11th, 2008

Banking IT staff at Hungary’s MKB Bank found that their Billing and Charges system was taking more than 24 hours to run one daily cycle. The Billing and Charges system has two phases: by day it collects data and after Close of Business (COB) and through the night it processes the data. This processing involves data analysis, account balance calculations and data warehousing amongst other actions. Even though the after-hours phase was not slow enough to be too great a problem, the whole 24 hour cycle looked unstable enough for IT decision makers at the bank to call in a sweeping overhaul.

MKB invited Alvicom Ltd. to help improve the performance of the Billing and Charges system, having been satisfied with Alvicom’s previous successes as Banking IT systems contractor for MKB on similar previous projects. The overhaul began in September 2007. Besides Alvicom systems’ experts there were also other contractors on the project: a systems infrastructure team, software developers and implementation experts and MKB Banking staff.

“They called us about joining the project on a Friday and we were in place and on task by Monday morning,” said Szabolcs Déak, Alvicom’s head of Banking IT. He continued: “Our brief was basically to make the daily run of the Billing and Charges system much more stable. We succeeded – we were able to cut the daily run time to 70% of the previous level.”

Success was not easy to come by, though, since the project team was made up of several very varied specialist sub-teams from different firms using different tools and methods and not always singing from the same hymn book. Communication and co-operation were vital.

We needn’t have worried though. A good working harmony was soon established with very positive suggestions and insights being offered from all sides. After 4 months work the project was successfully completed. Our modifications and improvements to the system meant that system error risks had been greatly reduced and the stability of the daily system cycle had been improved dramatically. Other improvements we offered MKB and which led to greater COB system cycle stability were database performance boosting, program optimization and multi-cycle paralleling. System’s operational protocol/discipline issues also improved significantly, as did overall user-friendliness.

“It wasn’t just a success for us,” added Szabolcs Déak. “Because we were able to cut their cycle run-time by over 30% without leaving them with hardware issues, MKB have saved themselves a lot of budget too.”

“We also created a lot of important user documentation for MKB to help them with future system maintenance and COB stability work. It included general and specific technical advice on avoiding any future slowing of the system.”

Attila Keszei, IT chief at MKB said of the project: “Alvicom have been a great help to our IT branch for over 5 years continually now.” Since getting to know each other when MKB needed experts to help them implement a new IT system in 2002, Alvicom have been the contractor of choice for this forward-looking bank.

Mr. Keszei added that he also chose Alvicom because of their use of the right, up-to-date testing tools and the quality of their staff and that because Alvicom’s testing was mostly automated it almost never disrupted system continuity at the bank while the work was underway which was a big boost to performance.

“It was vital for MKB that the overnight cycles finished on time,” said István Elek, MKB’s Head of IT Operations. “Alvicom spared us the headaches and the system runs smoothly enough now, free from the danger of unexpected glitches or system failure. It’s good to know that the bank is ready for another day’s stable trading each morning.”