Borland Delphi and Union Bank
Date: 1996/01/14
Message-ID: <4dc384$9p3_at_rigel.pixi.com>
[InforWorld]
RAD tool speeds up Union Bank's race for business
Borland's Delphi lends California bank a better way to handle heavy volume
of customer data.
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September 25, 1995
In an industrial corner of the Southern California city of Santa Ana sits a sprawling complex called the AutoMall, offering some 20 car dealerships eagerly vying for business.
Surprisingly, it's after a new car sale has closed that the real high-pressure competition begins. That's when the car dealers call banks to farm out their car loans. The first bank to review the paperwork and call back gets to cover the loan, a very lucrative revenue outlet.
Because of its antiquated, people-intensive, paper-based processes, Union Bank's Santa Ana branch, as well as other branches, missed out on a lot of car dealership loans. But a pilot project in Santa Ana aims to make the bank, based in San Francisco and numbering 200 branches across California, competitive again.
Using Borland International Inc.'s Delphi client/server rapid application development tool, a team of six staff programmers are in the thick of adding a streamlined customer relationship management system that will serve as a front end to Union Bank's mainframe system.
In Santa Ana, this translates into a tool for bank loan officers to evaluate indirect car loans quickly and efficiently. In some cases the local Union Bank branch will be able to give a response to a car dealer while still on the phone -a great improvement over the delays built into the older system.
But car dealer loans are just the beginning. Using Delphi, FileNet Corp.'s workflow technology, and Oracle Corp.'s database as a back end, Union Bank aims to automate the administrative environment across all its branches, which are choked by the approximately 100,000 business accounts and about 500,000 to 1 million related banking accounts residing on the corporate mainframe.
[Image]
"Delphi has allowed Union Bank to handle its customer data
more efficiently and improve its services," says Eric Wilson,
senior programmer analyst.
STALLED SYSTEM. The system Union Bank used to handle loans and other customer transactions actually required customer service staff to put a telephoning customer on hold in order to physically retrieve out of the files a paper record of that customer's previous dealings with the bank. The customer service representative was out of commission for 5 to 10 minutes during the retrieval process - a disruptive annoyance for the customer, and in cases such as the car dealership loans, a real competitive disadvantage for the bank, one that often translated into lost profits.
Union Bank looked to end this time- consuming process by scanning all of those existing paper files into digital images and storing them in the Oracle database. And data input will be made more efficient by automatically digitizing incoming forms, such as faxes concerning a transaction, into computer images.
"We've got a lot of people doing things that need to be automated, like
typing letters, shuffling papers, that sort of thing -we're trying to get
the element of speed in the business," says Union Bank's Eric Wilson,
senior programmer analyst.
Wilson and his team then moved to create FileNet applications that can communicate with the mainframe data via Delphi.
The resulting new graphical client relationship management program, which the bank is currently rolling out to its far-flung branches, will offer bank officers many of the features found in conventional client/server applications, such as contract management and sales automation capabilities.
In addition to speeding up the loan process, bank officers will now receive a monthly report to view financial data on individual customers, including a customer's relationship with other Union Bank customers.
Using Delphi's Notebook tabs, a bank employee can view folders containing information on individual customers, related customers, contacts, and services provided to the customer, such as credit cards.
From the tab, the employee can set up an appointment by clicking on a customized button designated for scheduling purposes. If the employee is not connected to the bank's LAN, E-mail automatically alerts other attendees of the meeting.
With these improvements, loans will be dispensed more quickly, data can be analyzed more accurately, and money will be saved by reducing paper costs, as well as administrative staff.
"We're working right now on the numbers on how much time and energy we'll
save at the end," Wilson adds.
CONSIDERING THE OPTIONS. While outside consultants have glided in and out of the several million dollar project that's bringing these improvements, most of the design and implementation of the application has been done in-house by an IS team led by Wilson. He came to Union Bank last year from Computer Sciences Corp., where he was responsible for implementing cutting-edge technology in the defense industry -a background that has served him well at the bank.
In his new position, Wilson went looking for software offering powerful, rapid development tools.
"C++ is great, but when you have to get something out the door Delphi
really fits in the hole. We looked at a couple of different products, like
[Microsoft Corp.'s] Visual Basic and [PowerSoft Corp.'s] PowerBuilder, but
they just weren't robust enough; when you got into heavy-duty programming
they fell apart. We wanted rapid application development but still did not
want to remove ourselves from serious programming," Wilson says.
The Union team liked Delphi's client/server architecture and the fact that the tool can be used to build applications connecting to data stored on the bank's IBM 3090 mainframe running the MVS operating system.
In addition to these features, Delphi works with the bank's existing Paradox for Windows files used on its desktop PCs, as well as with an existing OS/2 LAN Server. And it can run under Windows 3.1, which the bank was also using.
Union felt the technical strengths of the Delphi toolset offset concerns about Borland's shaky balance sheet.
"I think Borland's financial status was a concern initially, but the
product was so strong that we felt someone else would pick up its
development if the company did go down," Wilson explains.
The goal of reusing code is a famously elusive one, but Union says the object-oriented libraries in Delphi saved untold hours of development time. After a short learning curve, the team was reusing batches of code regularly, according to Wilson.
PLETING THE DEAL.Provided the bank decides it can spare its in-house development team, Wilson and his developer band will use Delphi and the workflow lessons they've already learned from building the customer service relationship system to upgrade the systems linked to the bank's teller stands.
Once a unified customer database is completed for the entire company,
"tellers will use the Delphi application information to facilitate getting
your loan approved while you're sitting at the bank," Wilson says.
Union Bank officers are calling the system upgrades accomplished so far a resounding success.
The application development team agrees with this assessment, although perhaps for a different set of reasons.
"I like working with this neat technology. You've got a lot of mainframe
types at the bank, so when you come into a shop like this you have to teach
people, which is fun," Wilson says.
"I'm not here to do maintenance; maintenance really stinks. I'm creating
something. Although automation per se is sort of an old idea, the stuff
we're doing with Delphi and FileNet is definitely new," he says.
If only the new car buyers just signing up for a $15,000 loan at the Santa Ana AutoMall could feel so enthusiastic.
BRIDGING THE DEVELOPER GENERATION GAP
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When Union Bank decided it needed to overhaul the systems it used to manage its customer data, there was plenty of potential for a generational clash.
The team doing the front-line client/server development work to transform the bank from a technological also-ran was made up of twenty-something's, led by 27-year-old senior programmer analyst Eric Wilson. The older management team had deep mainframe roots.
But there were no showdowns along the way to a microprocessor-based world. Union Bank's executives listened to their youthful experts in making the risky and expensive decision to overhaul the IS infrastructure. Just as importantly, this show of faith in the company's young development staff imbued Wilson and his team with confidence and provided the money and resources they needed to succeed.
"Usually the executives just tell us what to do. Now they have to buy into
a new philosophy. It's working out real nicely," Wilson adds.
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Copyright © 1995 BorlandInternational, Inc. Last modified November 16, 1995 Received on Sun Jan 14 1996 - 00:00:00 CET