Total Outsourcing Case in Financial Industry

Client Overview
The client is one of the largest capital companies in China whose investor and parent company is China Power Group. It is a non-banking financial institution providing group members with financial services with respect to banking services, asset management, settlement, entrusted loan, insurance business, etc. The client is the only Capital company in China with sub-companies. The total assets of the client are more than 15 billion USD.

Project Overview
Before 2004, the IT infrastructure of client had matured, but the IT applications were still in a very basic form. What they used as business processing system was a C/S model as against a centralized system. The accounting system provided very basic functionality. There was no integration or interaction between different systems. This situation had seriously blocked the growth and innovation of business. For example, their accounting department had to spend most of their time making vouchers manually which were already prepared and stored on the computer by representatives. One other instance is that they could not deal with settlement across different sub-companies which are a much desired requirement.

It was in 2004 that the client decided to start development of new IT applications and systems. After tough and complex biding, USE was selected as the primary IT outsourcing company who will take the total responsibility of IT development. USE was not only selected to work as software service provider in this project but also acted as planner and organizer. During the project, USE helped the customer manage and coordinate with other hardware service providers and third party software providers.

Solution From USE
Since the business processes of client were very complex, it became critical to learn their processes and re-organize them before starting software development. USE professional business and IT consulting team took around 5 months; working closely with employees of client; to organize and design the business processes and come up with specifications which are not only a blueprint of business processes but also an input for the system construction. The high level business logic is as below:

New design's main advantages are:
1. A totally centralized system where all end users located in different areas use same system and data are stored in a central database. Thus making it possible for the client to realize centralized and uniform management and helping executive managers to oversee and monitor the business performance more conveniently through real time reports.
2. A new and improved business model with efficient accounting and processing methods. The business processing information typed into system is automatically transformed to accounting information.
3. Extensive customer service modules such as online banking and online loan requests were developed to meet the needs of customers.
4. The integration of the system enables it to communicate with other systems of customer and commercial banks. This improves the transaction processing speed as well as accuracy dramatically.

Points of project
Technical Structure:      J2EE Platform
Development Platform:  USE Global Application Platform
Database:                    Oracle 9i Enterprise Version
Application Server:        Bea Weblogic Application Server 8.1
Financial System:         UFIDA NC 3.0
Portal Server:                Bea Weblogic Portal 8.1
BI:                               Hyperion

USE Global Application Platform, abbreviated as GAP is an application development platform developed by USE and is specifically designed for custom application software development projects. It is not only a software development assistant but also provides a highly reusable model for software mass production.

Benefits

• Reusable modules and standard development model offered shorter development time and lower
• development risk. Thus decreasing software development cost.
• Leading technology employed, enabled reliability and provided scalability.
• Standard development and maintenance model decreased the maintaining cost. 

Result
The project lasted for 3 years with an average team of 30 engineers. The second phase was delivered in May 2007 and the system is live now. This advanced IT application is bringing the client’s business into a new era.