Excellent spirit and exemplary solidarity

The Company

With a market share of more than 30%, BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions Luxembourg (a 100 % subsidiary of BGL BNP Paribas) is the leading provider for leasing and rental solutions for professional equipment in Luxembourg. Company’s offer ranges from lease financing to outsourcing, including flexible and long-term leasing and is mainly directed through the BGL BNP Paribas sales network to companies and professionals, enabling thus common clients to optimize the use of their assets. Alternatively, the leasing offerings are also oriented to manufacturers, software publishers and equipment distributors to support and finance their sales.

BGL BNP Paribas Group in Luxembourg is the largest financial sector employer and a major player in the financial market. It also actively contributes to the market’s development thanks to the diversity of its activities and the professionalism of its teams.

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions Group is also present in Austria, Belgium, China, France, Germany, India (Financial Company with SREI), Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Hungary, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

The Situation

In spring of 2013, the company was using as core leasing system an, in-house developed IT solution, AS400 based. The system was very stable and had not required major technical updates during the 18 years in production; but maintaining and improving it for supporting the business development and regulatory evolutions became more and more difficult.

Also, BGL BNP Paribas’ 600 sales force team accessed a web portal to enter data into a database comprising of 8000 clients totaling 30000 contracts, out of which 3.000 clients with 10.000 contracts are currently active.

The need to comply with the new EU requirement - SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) generated a situation which required investments into the IT system. Instead of making the old system SEPA compliant, the company decided to invest into a new system targeting several major objectives:

• Implementing an integrated end-to-end leasing system supporting the operational business at sales and back-office level;
• Building the new solution on the latest technology allowing further upgrades at reasonable investment costs;
• Using the specific technical and functional know-how of an approved IT solution provider active in the international leasing market;
• Providing a state-of-the-art, web-enabled front end solution for a sales force that is not specialized in the leasing business
• Keeping the running IT costs at an affordable level by reasonable software costs and by sharing the technical infrastructure with BGL BNP Paribas;

The Solution

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions Luxembourg checked available IT solutions on the market and contacted several potential providers for finally deciding to contract with TotalSoft, since Charisma appeared to be responding to the main objectives of the company. Furthermore, the fact that Charisma is already supporting the Groups Leasing operations in Austria and Romania was considered as an advantage in the selection process.

According to their importance related to the business processes, three phases of project implementation have been set up:

First stage aimed at implementing those modules absolutely necessary for sustaining the business, so as to achieve the SEPA objective which was to come into force in February 2014. Thus, Charisma ERP with all modules covering the Point of Sale, Core leasing functionalities, Accounting and Document Management System were implemented. Data migration, a rather difficult task in view of the fact that it had to be done from the AS400 system, was completed within only 2 months. With the Document Management System (DMS), a very important advantage in terms of continuity was achieved. Documents which, prior to the implementation had to undergo many steps until being stored into folders, can now be found within an integrated IT system and in the related business context. Any document that is prepared by Charisma to be submitted to the client is now electronically accessible in the DMS. The Business Intelligence module and the Point of Sale/Web Leasing came to complete the flow. Worth mentioning is also the DWH reporting, a centralized database gathering all data which are used for BI and for other reports, such as BASEL 2 reporting (internationally centralized reporting about risk and guarantees, corporate clients). Interfaces have been developed allowing the company to comply with the complex rules and data management related to the advanced method of BASEL 2 reporting.

Second stage involved the implementation of Customer Relationship Management, including modules for business processes involving automation support for Collection, Remarketing activities, Legal and Repossession.

Last stage, still to come, concerns the e-care (Customer Self Service portal) and Workflow support.
 
Results

The implementation was carried out with lightning speed. Review and approval lasted two months, and development was done until November. The critical phases of a project that normally would be planned on one full year were achieved on only eight months. The new Point of Sale portal was designed with strong usability aim and was fully functional at go live, with 600 sales force users and credit analysts accessing it simultaneously.

The modules are fully integrated and open the opportunity to seriously increase the working rhythm, allowing speeding up the end-to-end process in a very customer oriented way. In the same objective of optimizing customer focused processes, granting eventual credit lines is now being performed automatically, and no longer requires manual tracking of several folders.

The unique database and the new Business Intelligence module allow fast, easy and flexible reporting.

The new system supports a new selling approach - sales through dealers outside the bank channel - allowing BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions to develop a new line of business.  By implementing the new system business processes have been streamlined, employees’ know-how was documented and transferred to the system, which is reflected in better control on business; as a result, errors in everyday business due to limitations of the old system were eliminated.

“I am particularly proud on the speed and the quality of the achieved Charisma implementation. All of us knew as from the beginning that the challenge would be huge as we worked in a very tight time frame due to regulatory constraints.

Excellent spirit and exemplary solidarity between TotalSoft’s implementation team, BGL BNP Paribas’ IT specialists and the key users of BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions allowed us to realize the target within the fixed plan. Even in the most critical migration phase at the end of the year 2013, we did not notice any negative impact on our customers.
Being aware that the last modules that are still to be implemented will provide a further improvement of our process flows, I feel comfortable as of today to pretend that the project is a great success, realized in time and agreed financial budget.

I would like to thank and congratulate all the contributors to this success for their excellent work.”
General Manager, BNP Paribas Leasing Group Luxembourg

Case study revised in 2014.