HBOS, the UK banking outfit formed from the merger of Bank of Scotland and Halifax, claims to have achieved substantial procurement cost savings following the first-phase implementation of a new system which for the first time provides a consolidated view of all suppliers to the two merged banks.
The technology platform for the HBOS supplier relationship management (SRM) project was managed by UK information systems group Acuma. It deploys Kalido's Dynamic Information Warehouse to integrate supplier and purchasing information from the differing systems of Halifax Bank and the Bank of Scotland (BoS) to provide a consistent view of procurement data across the new group.
The project has enabled HBOS to eliminate a number of suppliers from its systems and develop a consistent group-wide procurement coding structure, consolidating 17,000 individual account codes and re-ordering into just 27 commodities split into 142 categories.
The solution enables users to view procurement spend in numerous ways - by supplier, by category of spend, or by commodity - and to drill down from aggregated information to the level of individual transactions for the first time. This has made complex procurement information much easier to understand and analyse, says the bank.
In addition to the Kalido warehouse, the solution incorporates extract, transfer and load tools from Ascential to handle initial data preparation and Business Objects business intelligence software for reporting and analysis.
Ian Taylor, head of group procurement, HBOS, comments: "The role of procurement has been a key element in delivering cost savings following the HBOS merger. Our new SRM system has delivered accurate information very quickly to empower our procurement professionals to negotiate costs with suppliers and streamline processes."