Replacing off-the-shelf tools to transform BI, planning, & analysis

00:00:25Capitec Bank is currently the largest and one of the youngest retail banks in South Africa. We have around 850 retail branches at the moment, as well as about 3000 cash related devices out of the field.

00:00:39So a cash related devices, an ATM where you're going withdraw money or deposit money for example. We have been in a place were we grown rapidly but our focus is have largely been around the client and I think that was the right place to be right, focus on the client, the experience, what products we sell.

00:00:59However, what happened was in the back end, we didn't have the processes or infrastructure to support ourselves as an organization. So we were finding large inefficiencies in our support processes, specifically things like finance planning, procurement management etcetera.

00:01:15So we did two things. We implemented a SAP Hana as our ERP which is actually just successfully gone live in february this year. And in addition to that we chose board as our platform for planning in totality: I think it is a central planning platform. It really ticks all the boxes for us. But let's start at the beginning.

00:01:40I mean strategy, from a strategy planning perspective, I think we're very similar to any organization. We have a book of work, we plan our initiatives, we prioritize, we then also look at our sales and demand forecasting but our products that we sell are things like savings accounts, transactional accounts loans, credit cards, insurance products. So maybe not the tangible things that you would normally associated with a planning environment but still very much needing to be catered for.

00:02:10So the key starting point for us when embarking on this journey actually landed in the financial space where we designed and built a number of budget and product forecast models specifically looking at the time or initially at our saving transact products.

00:02:28And our focus has been since then on trying to mature these processes by introducing things like driver-based forecasting.So for example, if we change the number of branches or we roll out new devices or we increase the number of products we have, what the client we service needs, and we can see the impact of that on the actual demand.

00:02:47We also started things like subject matter expert groups to try and engage our key business stakeholders to ensure that we really get one version of the truth and one version of the landscape that we're looking at for the overhead of 18 months ahead, for example, 24 months for that matter.

00:03:04In addition to that, a demand driven material requirements planning, that's quite a mouthful: DDMRP in Board - for the daily execution of cash planning and ensuring that we get the right cash to the devices at the right time.

00:03:19I think what board has enabled us to build is one of a kind and we've been able to design a model that meets our exact needs and business requirements. I think Board specifically has enabled us to not only build a lot of the use cases or models within the tool itself, but - as you can see there - from some of our areas.

00:03:39We've got sequel models, we've got other toolsets like "parent" and it's enabled us to really join all of these models together to ultimately create one central planning landscape, which is really the key selling point that we we went embarked on the Board journey for the beginning.