CASE STUDY : BI unifies reporting at ICICI Bank

In order to consolidate a BI framework across a network of about 950 branches
and 3,300 ATMs in 17 countries, ICICI Bank replaced its existing disparate
report­ing systems and implemented a single enterprise-wide framework with SAS.
The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform caters to ICICI Bank's need for
flexibility, scalability and its goal to derive a 'single view of the customer.'

Enterprise intelligence

To drive enterprise intelligence across its branches, ICICI Bank needed an
enterprise-wide reporting system to empower synergistic report­ing between
applications that support the business and at the same time, offer flexibility
to support the reporting needs of various business units.

One of the key param­eters for the evaluation of a solution was the
scalability to support the growing data in ICICI Bank. An area of concern was
support­ing the business if the growth in the number of users exceeded the
planned number.

Prior to using SAS, the existing envi­ronment included multiple reporting
systems that were cumbersome to maintain, and various departments still used
disparate reporting tools. The IT team arranged infor­mation dissemination
across the enterprise manually. In addition, bandwidth issues, security concerns
with enter­prise data lying on desktops and ex­ponentially increasing data
established a need for a user-friendly solution that could integrate all data
sources across the organization.

The perfect fit

The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform was an ideal fit in this business
scenario, because once implemented it would provide the bank with the key
cornerstones of manageability, interoperability, scalability and usability.

• Usability: The SAS web-based solution would enable ICICI to provide
  information access to all users across the bank.
• Scalability: SAS can scale upward and out­ward to address a great number
  of queries from many users.
• Interoperability: SAS can talk to all of the bank's existing data sources
  natively.
• Manageability: Security concerns can be addressed with the SAS Management
  Console that can be deployed as one point of control in setting up
  permissions.

BI strategy

ICICI Bank was also interested in a data integration solution for its data
warehouses and data marts. This helped broaden the scope of the SAS solution
with the introduc­tion of SAS Data Integration for the creation of marts.

To address issues related to migration and scalability, SAS suggested a proof
of concept and involved both the business and the IT users during that phase.
The team of business users and IT managers learnt that SAS took one-third of the
time to build a reporting cube as compared to Cognos. Cube exploitation clocked
in with sub second response times, and the entire migration of the cube took
only four hours, including un­derstanding the transforma­tions and getting the
raw data in place.

The successful proof of concept was the key turning point for ICICI's
decision to purchase SAS because their need for consolidating the BI environment
and setting up an enterprise wide business intelligence platform had been
created.

According to Pravir Vohra, ICICI Group CTO, adoption of SAS in ICICI Bank was
in line with their strategy to consolidate their BI framework and establish an
enterprise wide BI platform. “With the SAS Data Integration Server, it will now
be possible for us to integrate our data sources across the enterprise. SAS
Enter­prise BI Server will empower our information users to have access to the
requisite reports through an enterprise-wide reporting system. Our partnership
with SAS will go a long way in streamlining our BI strategy,” he said.

Subbalakshmi BM

subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in