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Customer Snapshot
Company: BECU (formerly Boeing Employees' Credit Union)
Business/Industry: Finance
Company Headquarters: Tukwila, Washington, USA
Webpage: www.becu.org
UC4 Customer: since 2004
Technical Environment: UNIX, Microsoft Windows server 2003, Virtual test environment, Microsoft Windows XP, Open Solutions TCCUS
The Company
Established in 1935, BECU began as an eighteen-member cooperative of Boeing employees with assets totaling US$9.00. By 1968, BECU had grown to six branches, and by 1985, after 50 years in business, the credit union had matured to 96,000 members with assets totaling US$569 million. Today, with more than 460,000 members and more than US$6.8 billion in assets, BECU is the largest credit union in Washington and one of the top five financial cooperatives in the country. All Washington state residents are eligible to join. BECU has more than 35 Puget Sound locations, including Financial Centers in Tukwila and Everett, and 37 Neighborhood Financial Centers, most of which are located in popular supermarkets.
The Challenge
In 2002, BECU opened its doors to all residents of Washington and continued to experience between 8 and 9 percent growth in annual membership. BECU implemented Open Solutions TCCUS software to help manage financial reporting and batch jobs, but found that staff was spending valuable time manually producing nightly batch reports. This procedure was not only time consuming, it also presented many opportunities to introduce human error.
Lori Keehr, in BECU Operations, described a possible worst-case scenario in which a human error introduced into routine processing could negatively affect live consumer accounts, a mistake that would be extremely expensive and time consuming to correct, and could potentially impact many of BECU's 460,000 members.
To guard against error, BECU had created a series of manual quality checks. Operations staff would copy their 15-35 nightly batch jobs for report processing into queues, but because queues are named numerically, it was easy for staff to transpose queue names. So, another staff person would perform an initial quality check to ensure the correct duplication of queues. Finally, the night shift would conduct a final review of queue names before manually setting up the jobs to run on multiple workstations.
It was imperative that the correct jobs were arranged in a specific order to allow them to run concurrently, but even with diligent checks, the system was not foolproof; even the most conscientious employees can make mistakes. In 2004, Operations looked for an automation solution that could streamline their batch environment and would be compatible with their existing infrastructure. "I shopped other products", Keehr said, "but UC4 was the only vendor who could provide me with a proof-of-concept for Open Solutions."
The Solution
Assured that the UC4 platform would work with Open Solutions in a multi-platform environment, BECU joined the ranks of other UC4 customers committed to getting the most out of their existing investments.
Adding Value As BECU implemented the UC4 platform, they found they could mimic how they would have operated manually, only without the wasted time and probable human error. Consultants leveraged the automation capabilities of the solution to eliminate manual intervention. No more copying queues, no more time-consuming triple-checks.
The flexibility of the UC4 platform allowed BECU to customize their environment, sending certain output to specific locations for archiving and outputting other modules to partner and vendor directories. By building out 52 fully-automated job streams and leveraging dynamically generated substitution variables, the UC4 platform provides BECU with the tools to process daily, nightly, weekly, monthly, and yearly batches without scripting and without human intervention. Automation reduces the risk of bad data by eliminating human error; saves time by trimming lag; and increases efficiency as jobs run reliably, on time, and in the correct order.
Keehr noted that building processes into the UC4 platform has shown BECU a significant savings in time and has helped defray the cost of maintaining multiple workstations. They have saved even more man-hours by using the UC4 platform to generate nightly reports. If errors do occur, the robust reporting capability allows BECU's team to see how and why a job failed, rather than having to guess.
The UC4 platform improved IT processes by allowing BECU to capitalize on existing technology-accelerating the environment without bringing in new hardware, additional staff, or forcing expensive upgrades to existing applications.
The Results
As BECU plans for their future, they will continue to deliver the products and services that their members need and desire. To ensure that these needs are met, IT Operations plans 25-30 projects a year, all of which must first be tested. As Sue Jones, IT Operations Manager says, "We have batch processing that is required during the test phase of these projects. The UC4 platform has allowed us to automate approximately 80 percent of our test environment batch processing jobs. If we had to do this manually, we would either have to add two – three staff or slow down the implementation of projects."
In addition to the significant savings in employee cost, Keehr anticipates a 'huge savings' as they roll out each newly automated operations component. The UC4 migration tools can even automate moving business processes from the development to the test and production environments, so risk, labor, and errors are removed from the migration process. And because of their success using the UC4 platform, Keehr says she is "looking forward to automating more and more of our jobs."
UC4 Benefits
- Accelerated business process through efficient use of technology
- Increased efficiency through automation
- Robust error reporting keeps Operations staff aware of problems
- Role-based security
- Streamlined testing environment
- Utilizes existing IT infrastructure
"UC4 has allowed us to automate approximately 80 percent of the batch processing jobs. If we had to do this manually, we would either have to add two—three staff or slow down the implementation of projects."
Sue Jones, Manager IT Operations
BECU, USA
