As yet few companies are using performance management solutions in tandem to deliver closed loop performance managment and those that do, such as Zions Bancorporation, are well ahead of the curve and gaining benefits that their peers have yet to enjoy. Zions Bancorporation uses the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Planning and Consolidation application for planning and budgeting and the SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management application for modeling costs. It feeds the costs, together with interest spreads calculated in the bank’s funds transfer pricing solution, into the “profitability mart,” and calculates net profits at the individual account level. Knowing how different products and different types of customers create value for the bank is critically important to many commercial decisions that executives and managers have to make. It helps them determine, for example, where best to spend marketing dollars and how to price individual loans.But the bank gets much more from its implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management than simple best-of-breed deployments. It can take trended volumes and activity unit rates from the latter application and combine them with data on interest spreads and fee income from its shareholder value model, which summarizes the data in the profitability mart. It can then auto-populate many of the important line items in its budget. This means that business managers no longer have to forecast expenses themselves and can simply review and amend the figures generated for them.
This has resulted in budgets that are both quicker to produce and more accurate. But a specific transformational benefit is enabling the bank to keep resources and capacity tightly aligned with demand during the current period of uncertainty. That benefit is the ability to manage the business with quarterly rolling reforecasts rather than the traditional annual budget and half-yearly review.
Below are the video testamonial of Walter Young discussing their implementation and the Business Transformation Study.
Walter Young of Zions Bancorporation talks about SAP EPM from Richard Barrett on Vimeo.
Zions is a $51 billion US based financial services company. This interview was conducted with Walter Young, SVP of Zions Bancorporation. The group is unique in that it comprises 8 individually named and autonomous banks. In Walter’s words, they have moved from a 1,000+ spreadsheet “excel mess” to an efficient and streamlined budgeting cycle. Zions are using SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management in addition to other SAP BusinessObjects solutions such as Xcelsius.
