Top German bank NORD/LB improves business and technical efficiencies using IBM and SAP

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Headquartered in Hannover, NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank is one of the top ten leading financial institutions in Germany. The bank employs approximately 6,950 people in Germany and in the important international financial capitals. Its total assets amount to about €222 billion.

Rapidly expanding data consumption was stretching the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse systems to the limit in technical terms. Business queries and report generation took too long, slowing technical operations.

Sabine Nagel, Project Leader at NORD/LB, comments, “The sheer amount of data increased and was growing steadily, and performance on our previous technical backbone had reached its limits. Workflow efficiency was being hampered, with query response times increasingly slowing down. This is unacceptable in a fast-paced environment such as the banking business. We wanted to put in place a solution that would last for at least three years, and in the short-term would immediately improve query response.”

Need for speed
NORD/LB uses a central model for analyzing its business information, based on SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW). This approach protects data integrity and consistency. NORD/LB wished to preserve the functionality of SAP NetWeaver BW, and find a way to solve the performance issues.

NORD/LB selected SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (SAP NetWeaver BWA), which provides improved performance through use of indexing existing data. Working with IBM and Business Partner c.a.r.u.s., NORD/LB selected the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, a complete, pre-configured solution designed to deliver rapid, cost-effective and high-performance SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator deployment.

Andreas Lautensack, Senior IT Consultant at c.a.r.u.s., comments, “We implemented the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, based on IBM BladeCenter, as it provides excellent integration and communication with the production SAP systems. As we already had an IBM infrastructure, it made sense to take advantage of the existing environment in order to be able to implement a new solution quickly and easily.”

NORD/LB embarked on a careful multi-stage implementation process, connecting the solution initially to the quality management system and then subsequently to the production system after just a few days of successful testing.

Sabine Nagel adds, “After testing the system, and as soon as we gave the green light for the project to go ahead, the solution was implemented within a few days, so we could ensure business operations and improve technical efficiency. We are very satisfied with the speed with which the implementation was able to take place. We succeeded in increasing query speeds and reporting, which improved by a significant tally of 30-40 percent. Now the simple, standard reports that are accessed by most of our users run in less than 10 seconds. User satisfaction has increased. It also means that work is more efficient and administrative processes are quicker. We have also made significant savings on the disk capacity required to support our database.”

IBM Business Partner c.a.r.u.s. was responsible for the implementation. Andreas Lautensack notes, “A major attribute of the IBM solution lay in the General Parallel File System (GPFS) which enables high-performance enterprise file management.

"GPFS provides the underlying storage with a very efficient file system and is one significant area that clearly differentiates IBM from its competitors. It also provides a safeguard for the future, as it offers the possibility of implementing a high availability solution easily while providing disruption-free capacity upgrades simply by adding additional blade servers to the chassis.”

In addition, IBM BladeCenter server infrastructure provides scalable, enterprise class reliability ensuring maximum availability for users.

Reducing complexity for seamless integration
All of NORD/LB's infrastructure for SAP is hosted and maintained at an external IT services provider. Other IT systems of NORD/LB are being operated in-house and partially managed by IBM Strategic Outsourcing.
Sabine Nagel says, “We wanted to get as much as possible in one package and from one single vendor, as this simplifies implementation and reduces costs. The partner we chose was able to integrate the solution seamlessly into our existing IBM Power-based architecture and came up with a clear roadmap for the future.”

Widespread benefits
The IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator supports every single business area in the bank, including reporting, financial control and more.

The speed of response provided by the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator has enabled the technical team to provide the bank’s departments efficiently with information for its business operations.

At a technical level, the load times for InfoCubes have improved significantly. Users wishing to analyze data from multiple business perspectives can do so more rapidly.

As Sabine Nagel indicates, “Because we no longer need to build and maintain aggregates within the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse environments, we have saved on storage space as well as reducing time and effort for IT staff.”
Sabine Nagel notes, “Initially, we thought that performance gains and improvements would only affect reports. However, the loading of data from one cube to another cube has also improved and surpassed our expectations.

"Departments that require a lot of analysis, such as finance and accounting, have benefited as a lot of data is loaded from cube to cube. This has sped up loading processes and of course the reports, which are faster to produce. Furthermore, load processes can now be executed during business hours, while reports can be requested in parallel through the BW Accelerator.”

NORD/LB has a total of about 1,500 users who can log onto the system. Due to the nature of the financial industry, the queries and reports involve large volumes of data, all handled by the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, even during peaks where high demands are placed on the system.

Sabine Nagel concludes, “The overall partnership between the external service provider, c.a.r.u.s. and NORD/LB for the IBM Systems Solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator has really worked out well. We feel safe in the knowledge that this solution will sustain our needs for many years.”