The Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), the Philippines first and oldest bank, primes for its 155th year of service with an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft Philippines to standardize its productivity tools on Microsoft Office. Covering the commercial bank and its many subsidiaries & affiliates, including BPI Family Savings Bank, , Insurance Companies (Ayala Life Assurance, Inc., Ayala Plans, Inc., BPI/MS Insurance Corporation, and BPI Bancassurance, Inc.) and BPI Direct Savings Bank, the Enterprise Agreement gave BPI a more cost-effective way to acquire the latest Microsoft technologies, simplifying their license management and providing maintenance benefits to help ensure maximum productivity.
Throughout its history, BPI has responded to the financial service requirements and opportunities it has encountered, enabling it to maintain a leadership position in consumer banking, trust banking and asset management, corporate banking/corporate finance and bancassurance. With over 900 branches and around 1,300 automated teller machines, BPI has the largest combined network of branches/kiosk units and ATMs, servicing some 3 million depositors.
"To maintain our leadership position in the market, ensure customer satisfaction, efficient financial servicing, and regulatory compliance across all BPI companies and affiliates, we need a productivity tool that satisfied the following: (1) allows for easy external collaboration with our customers, as well as regulators such as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), most of which use Microsoft products in transactions; (2) works with banking applications such as Bloomberg, Reuters, OPICS and Mobius; (3) is secure, reliable, and easy to manage & support by our IT people; (4) is preferred by our users; and (5) guarantees ready support from a business partner/vendor that we can rely on," said Manuel C. Tagaza, Chief Information Officer & Senior Vice President, BPI. "Only Microsoft Office met all of these requirements."
To serve as an accurate basis for choosing the productivity tools to standardize on, BPI first decided to identify, evaluate, and take inventory of the productivity tools that help them support their business goals and requirements.
"BPI's IT department, the Information Systems Group (ISG), spearheaded the initiative which included conducting a study and survey of the productivity tools utilized throughout the bank's head offices in four office locations covering over 3,000 employees. Microsoft Office including popular applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Visio and FrontPage emerged as the preferred tools used by most BPI employees to perform their everyday business functions," said Rolando R. Mariano, Solution Specialist, Microsoft Philippines.
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The survey included an inventory of the existing productivity tools, employee interviews on how they are utilized and actual testing of the various options for productivity tools when used in actual BPI business scenarios. Microsoft Philippines utilized the information gathered to provide BPI with recommendations on establishing a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) beginning with a set of standard productivity tools.
"It was easy for BPI to see that having a standard operating environment (SOE) based on Microsoft Office would support our goals of maintaining our high-quality level of financial servicing, IT operational productivity and efficiency, having guaranteed support from a business partner (Microsoft), ensuring security compliance, and managing risks, including legal as well as operational threats," shared Joselito R. Mariano, IT manager responsible for productivity tools and Software Asset Management, BPI.
A Microsoft Enterprise Agreement is a software volume licensing program designed for corporate customers with 250 or more desktops. Its benefits include new version rights, a home use program, and other advantages including productivity benefits, support, tools, and training; amortized cost; lower total cost of ownership and improved workplace productivity; and volume licensing. The Enterprise Agreement enables businesses to capitalize on consolidated volume purchasing efficiencies and the flexibility to renew the enrollment for a one- or three-year term.
Apart from the tangible benefits for business users and IT, having an Office-based SOE supports BPI's high-level priorities around corporate governance and ensuring customer satisfaction.
"Moving towards having a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) is really just a part of a much bigger BPI corporate initiative around security, risk management and overall corporate governance. Standardization facilitates better security, reliability and supportability of all client computers in use by employees across the organization. Our executive leadership and business unit heads certainly appreciate the value that this IT environment will facilitate--the efficiency of transactions and streamlined processing by our personnel through a more seamless collaboration will ultimately lead to increased satisfaction of BPI customers," concluded Tagaza.
BPI began deploying Microsoft Office applications to its users in the early part of 2006. The bank is also looking at establishing a portal using Microsoft SharePoint to do software asset accountability tracking, as well as to optimize collaboration through efficient and effective search, use and sharing of information.
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