Central HR solution brings ease of management to Landbank of the Philippines

Landbank of the Philippines is tasked with supporting rural and agricultural enterprises, with retail banking services, loans, letters of credit, export guarantees and a range of related financial services. The bank has 343 offices, with a further five overseas branches, and employs some 7,000 people.

Managing recruitment, training and payroll tasks for bank personnel was handled on multiple different systems. Gathering financial data for planning purposes involved manual extraction from remote applications, manipulation by the IT team into suitable formats and subsequent loading and analysis. The process was slow, error-prone and expensive. Each independent application and system needed suitable software licenses and updates as well as hardware maintenance and support.

Alden Abitona, Head of the Data Center Management Department at Landbank of the Philippines, comments, “We had four applications for different personnel services, such as officers’ payroll, employee information system, rank and file payroll system and provident fund system. The result was that staff would have multiple profiles stored in separate places, making it extremely difficult to manage such a large company. Standard monthly reports were taking at least a week to produce.

“We knew that the answer was to consolidate to a central system, and started the selection procedure for both the software solution and appropriate infrastructure. The bank is expanding, and the former system was not able to grow cost-effectively. We wanted a way to manage personnel and reporting processes easily, reduce administration and support costs, and scale up as Landbank grew.”

Centralized HR services

The Landbank of the Philippines chose to implement a single, central instance of SAP ERP Human Capital Management, able to manage the complete portfolio of personnel activities for all of the bank’s employees. Accessed by around 30 users, the application runs under AIX on an IBM Power Systems 570 server. Data is managed on an IBM DS4800 storage server, with a total of 330GB capacity allocated to the human resources applications.

“The scattered systems and data have been replaced with a very powerful centralized service, more than capable of dealing with the 7,000 staff,” comments Alden Abitona. “Financial and budget planning reports are now fully automated, making accurate information available to executives very rapidly without costly manual processes. With the IBM and SAP solution, the same standard monthly reports that took at least a week are now available in less than a day.”

The SAP application and IBM systems replace multiple remote servers and applications, eliminating software licenses, hardware maintenance and network support. With the reduced complexity comes reduced IT administration, which allows the team to focus on more productive areas. The HR teams, too, are now free to attend to essential personnel issues such as succession planning and enterprise-wide training requirements, boosting productivity and improving staff relations.

“According to one department, using the former system required staff overtime purely for inputting and processing,” says Alden Abitona. “Now we have transferred to the SAP application, overtime has been reduced or eliminated, and we are able to manage our human resources system even though a large number of staff in that department have retired or resigned.”

Virtualized personnel

The SAP application runs in a single logical partition (LPAR) on the Power Systems 570 server. The server also supports, in separate LPARs, a range of other banking and general business applications, including loans, treasury, tax and email. This arrangement provides completely independent virtual servers for each application, and enables a share of the 16 processors in the Power Systems 570 to be allocated to each workload area as the demand rises, ensuring consistent response and performance.

“We chose the Power Systems 570 because it offers such great flexibility for growth,” says Alden Abitona. “We can use the LPAR technology to assign response criteria to each application, and the system automatically ensures that we meet our service level commitments. We can also add processors to the complete system, offering the bank simple scalability as we grow.”

An IBM Power Systems server is able to support multiple virtual servers within a single physical system. The total system compute resources available may be allocated to each LPAR according to priorities that define, for example, how the CPU cycles are distributed among partitions sharing a processor pool. In most application environments, including the mix of SAP and non-SAP applications at Landbank , it is possible to ensure that longer workload peaks (batch) occur at different times while short-term load spikes (dialogue) are statistically distributed. The IBM PowerVM virtualization technology enables the automatic, highly dynamic allocation of system resources to each virtual server containing an application, ensuring that service level commitments for response and related targets are fully met.

Safe, secure storage

Production data is stored on an IBM System Storage DS4800, and to complete the picture, the bank has implemented an IBM Power Systems 560 server and a further DS4800 server at a remote site to act as a failover and disaster recovery solution.

The IBM System Storage DS4800 is designed to handle the high transaction volumes and consequent I/O demands of data-intensive applications such as SAP ERP Human Capital Management. The DS4800 offers very great scalability, up to a total of 67.2TB within the same chassis, and is more than capable of handling projected growth at the Landbank .

“IBM Global Technology Services provided excellent advice in terms of helping us select the SAP application and sizing the servers and storage capacities. The IBM team took the trouble to understand the business proposition, and IBM and SAP worked hand in hand to produce excellent results,” concludes Alden Abitona.