Wincor Nixdorf is enhancing its consulting portfolio for the banking business. The company intends to expand its offer in business intelligence (BI) into a significant pillar of its consulting business. As a vendor of IT solutions for the branch business of retail banks, Wincor Nixdorf is thus responding to the increased demand for specialized knowledge in the area of designing and integrating business intelligence solutions.

According to a Business Week survey in which approximately 700 European and American companies took part, nearly 80% of managers complain that they have insufficient or imprecise information for important business decisions. The same number of managers also reported knowing of bad decisions that were made on the basis of insufficient information.

Reasons for poor-quality decision-making data lie primarily in individual companies’ IT landscapes. Sometimes these comprise isolated proprietary systems that have been in use for decades and were difficult to integrate into companies' IT environments.

Very often these systems’ interfaces enable data exchange only to a limited degree. All this has the effect that data lies unused in “silos” and cannot be linked to any other information. This situation makes the control of interdepartmental processes nearly impossible, and in particular hampers the production of reports for decision-making.

However, the success or failure of IT modernization and the installation of BI solutions depends to a great degree on the right implementation strategy and transparent project planning. Important factors include ensuring an overarching and consistent flow of data, adhering to schedules, working within budget, and impeding daily work as little as possible during the transition phase.

Here Wincor Nixdorf’s consultants can fall back on their know-how and experience from a wide variety of consulting and installation projects, particularly in the SAP and Business Objects arenas. Together with the customer bank, Wincor Nixdorf develops an integrated overall BI concept with the goals of ensuring the optimal processing and provision of data relevant to decision-making, analyzing tasks appropriately and presenting the outcome in the form of tailored reports. For this purpose, powerful, linkable reporting solutions are developed that are compatible with all the individual systems involved.

Wincor Nixdorf usually proceeds in four steps: First, we analyze the starting situation, pin down goals and develop the project strategy. In a second step, we identify the various processes and user concerns, define the key figures and determine the recipients, contents and structure of the reports. These first two steps are followed by the development of the new process and system design. A test environment is developed on this basis and a prototype BI solution installed. System, applications and data quality are then examined in a test phase, after which the system is configured and is put into operation.