Case Study: Bendigo Bank delivers a higher quality customer experience with HP

Bendigo Bank provides banking and wealth management services to individual and small to medium businesses. It is represented in all states and territories with almost 900 outlets, including more than 190 company-owned branches, 250 locally-owned Community Bank® branches, 90 agencies and 800 ATMs.

With a tradition of adding value for customers through quality personal service, the bank recently began to look to technology as the enabler of service delivery and business performance. Realising its existing systems were account-centric and not customer-focused, the bank embarked on an ambitious program to align technology more closely with its business strategy. The result? It purchased Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Universal Customer Master (UCM) applications to streamline customer-facing operations.

Known as ‘Enable Customer Phase 1’, the objective of this 18-month project was to introduce CRM and UCM capability across the organisation. As this would significantly impact 5,000 users and would result in considerable change management, the bank knew it had to deliver high-quality applications that functioned and performed at the levels demanded by the business.

“Enable Customer Phase 1 is the single largest implementation undertaken across the Bank in the past 15 years,” explains Robert Murphy, the project’s Technical Implementation Manager. “We had one chance to get it right and we knew quality assurance had to play a big part in the equation. We decided to make use of HP Quality Center software, which has been in the organisation for the past seven years. By leveraging an existing quality management solution, we could reduce our total cost of ownership and ensure a smoother transition to our new CRM platform.”

Objective

To drive the business value of its new customer facing solutions, Bendigo Bank sought to standardise system quality and performance 

Approach

Bendigo Bank adopted a quality and performance assurance approach using HP Quality Center software and HP LoadRunner software

IT improvements

  • Standard platform manages every aspect of system quality and performance
  • Centralisation enhances productivity
  • Isolated and fixed defects quickly
  • Established benchmarks for future enhancements
  • Fine-tuned testing efforts around data migration

About Bendigo Bank

The Bendigo Bank is the retail arm of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Group, an Australian company formed in November 2007 as a result of the merger between Bendigo Bank and Adelaide Bank. A publicly listed company, the group is owned by more than 82,000 shareholders.

Industry

Banking and Finance

Primary applications

  • Siebel CRM
  • Siebel URM

Primary software

  • HP LoadRunner software
  • HP Quality Center v9

Partnership provides valuable and timely expertise

To complete the quality approach and ensure all aspects of the new system were tested, the bank appointed JDS Australia to provide services in load testing and performance management.

An HP Platinum Partner and winner of the coveted HP Software Partner of the Year Award for the past four years, JDS is widely regarded as a leader in the Quality and Performance testing space. The company provides extensive and in-depth knowledge of the HP suite of testing and monitoring solutions offering support to clients in a variety of industries.

Steve Smith, JDS Australia’s Account Manager, believes that validating performance of newly deployed mission-critical systems is the key to achieving high user adoption and enhancing the consumer experience. Ensuring that applications are available and performing as intended is something that all organisations grapple with. JDS assisted Bendigo Bank by deploying HP LoadRunner to stress-test its Siebel CRM/URM system to ensure it could handle the peak loads and transactional volumes it would be subjected to, once live.

A quality ownership imperative

Prior to the adoption of HP Quality Center, the bank performed quality assurance on its core systems using a mixture of spreadsheets and documents. Following two mergers, the bank expanded rapidly and decided it needed to standardise its approach to quality assurance as a way of gaining some unity across the business and driving competitive advantage in a tough financial market. Today, the bank is firmly focused on retaining and growing its customer relationships, increasing loyalty and delivering personalised and consistent service experiences.

“We began the quality assurance part of the Enable Customer Phase 1 project by putting the ownership of quality in the hands of the business. We sought to make the business accountable for its operational outcomes. In short, we wanted quality management to be part of everyone’s mandate and HP Quality Center enabled us to do just that,” says Murphy.

“The quality management structure of this project was somewhat unusual. We used an iterative approach to development and put the business analysts, testers and developers into the one team. This allows us to fast-track time to success by facilitating communication and collaboration. But more importantly, it bridged the gap between business and technology expert, aligning testing more closely to business outcomes.”

Standardised processes improve decision-making

By providing a seamless, repeatable process for gathering requirements, planning and scheduling tests, analysing results and managing defects, HP has brought structure to managing quality for this project.

Murphy explains, “HP Quality Center creates an end-to-end quality management infrastructure to enforce standardised processes and best practices, such as our policy of ‘no work without a ticket’. It has given us the ability to streamline the management of defects, so that we can make effective ‘go/no-go’ decisions.

“By standardising on one quality platform we can do a lot of work in a short space of time, knowing that it is all contributing to our overall quality objectives. We can monitor the advancement of our work against these objectives to determine whether we are on track, on budget and on time. Having such insight into our progress delivers good governance and greatly improves decision-making.”

Testing what’s needed reduces risk

With quality firmly embedded in the centre of the organisation’s development mandate, ensuring that testing is prioritised according to business need was vital to achieving timely results for the bank.

HP Quality Center provides risk-based quality management to objectively assess and prioritise the highest-risk, highest-priority requirement, so testing efforts can be fine-tuned based on quantifiable business risk.

“HP Quality Center supports our approach of not wanting to test everything,” adds Murphy. “It enabled us to marry testing priorities with risk. We focused our testing efforts around data migration from our legacy systems into Siebel, as this was an integral part of future functionality.

“Prioritising our testing was also cost-effective in terms of centralisation and reusability. It meant that our people could store tests in one central location, review test planning information and reuse entire test plans or amend test cases across project components. Plus, having access to quality metrics put the business at ease because we could show that elements had been effectively tested and would work as intended.”

Validating performance

Gaining an understanding of how the Enable Customer project would meet the performance and scalability of the business was another objective the bank sought to achieve. Specifically, it wanted to obtain an accurate picture of end-to-end system performance before going live.

HP LoadRunner software was used to emulate the bank’s working environment with thousands of concurrent users. It stressed the application from end-to-end, applying consistent, measurable and repeatable workloads and identified issues that would affect its users in production.

“As we drove loads against the system, HP LoadRunner captured end-user response times for key transactions. It showed us that had we gone live, our users would have experienced slow performance when printing following a query. We rectified the issue in five days, but without HP LoadRunner it could easily have taken us a month or more to fix it.

“In the end, HP LoadRunner verified that our new Siebel CRM/URM system would meet specified performance requirements including sub-second response times,” confirms Murphy.

Quality, confidence, and success

After extensive testing and a successful pilot in two branches, the bank recently went live on Enable Customer Phase 1 without any showstoppers.

“We are delighted with the success of the project’s deployment and have achieved good outcomes through quality and performance testing,” adds Murphy. “Throughout the course of the project, we were able to isolate and fix defects quickly, automate quality processes and establish benchmarks for future enhancements. Quite simply, we delivered a high-quality, high-performing, robust system to support our people.”

“The value that HP Quality Center has brought to Bendigo Bank can be summarised in terms of standardisation, visibility and insight. We gained an end-to-end quality management infrastructure that gave us visibility into every element of the system and the insight we needed to make good decisions.”

Business Benefits

  • Gained 360-degree visibility into application quality
  • Went live on the single largest IT implementation in 15 years (Siebel CRM/URM) which functioned and performed at levels demanded by 5,000 users
  • Rectified performance issue in five days instead of a month
  • Aligned testing to business outcomes by facilitating communication and collaboration among business analysts, testers and developers
  • Reduced application deployment risk
  • Streamlined management process to assist with go/no-go decisions
  • Monitored the progress of work against objectives to track timeliness, budget and readiness

Looking ahead

HP Software will continue to play a key role as the backbone of Bendigo Bank’s quality and performance validation engine.

“We have successfully deployed one of the largest customer-facing projects in the history of the bank. Our focus now is on continuing to manage quality and performance of this system on a quarterly basis, ensuring that updates, changes, and upgrades are validated prior to release.

“Overall, HP has helped Bendigo Bank set the benchmark for ensuring our mission critical applications are high in quality and give the best performance to support our users in delivering excellent products and services,” concludes Murphy.