CONSOLIDATED BANK OF GHANA (CBG) FINDS A NEW RECIPE FOR ANALYZING ITS DATA In August 2018, the Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BOG), announced a merger of five local banks in Ghana, namely Beige Bank, Construction Bank, Royal Bank, Unibank and Sovereign Bank into the new Consolidated Bank of Ghana (CBG). The new Consolidated Bank becomes an Indigenous Ghanaian Universal Bank licensed by Bank of Ghana under the Specialized Deposit Taking Institutions Act, 2016 (Act 930). The bank was capitalized with GHS 450 million (USD 92 million) and a bond of GHS 5.76 billion (USD 1.18 billion) to help cover its liabilities. The bank started operations on August 1, 2018, with its Corporate Head Office located in Accra, and currently has over 114 branches across 13 regions in Ghana. The combined banks has more than 200 global products and services, $30.5 billion in revenue, and over 40,000 employees. Ten of its products and services, namely retention guarantee, advance payment guarantee, performance security, bid security, shipping guarantee, LPO financing , business cash-backed, empress term loan, express temporary overdraft, and SME Smart Loan each have annual revenue exceeding $2billion. Thus, running these banks required huge amounts of data from all of these products and services. This is clearly the world of big data. The uncertain global economy and the crises in the banking sector has significantly led to a significant fall in the money supply, and a decline in credit and growth, hence companies such as Consolidated Bank must constantly identify opportunities for improving operational efficiencies to protect their profit margins. The bank decided to deal with this challenge by focusing on optimizing six strategies, namely business realignment, channel optimization, process costs, staff productivity, technology and automation, and vendor relationship to support a faster pace of growth for the banks revenue stream and asset base than for its overhead costs. Managing all these requires timely and accurate data from the various branches. To ensure that the new Consolidated Bank of Ghana would be able to use all of its enterprise business data effectively, the general manager of the new bank decided to employ two large SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, namely, SAP S/4 HANA, Oracle NetSuite ERP, one for the 114 branches across the country and the other for all other global business. The combined bank also had to rethink its data warehouse. Before the merger, Unibank bank had maintained nearly 20 terabytes of data in a SAP Business Warehouse and was using SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator to facilitate operational reporting. SAP Business Warehouse is SAP's data warehouse software for consolidating organizational data and supporting data analytics and reporting. The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Accelerator is used to speed up database queries. Consolidated Bank of Ghana (CBG) management wanted decision makers to obtain more fine-grained views of the data that would reveal new opportunities for improving efficiency, self-service reporting and real-time analytics. SAP BW Accelerator was not suitable for these tasks. It could optimize query runtime only for a specific subset of data in the warehouse and was limited to reporting on selected views of the data. It cannot deal with data load and calculation performance and required replication of Business Warehouse data in a separate accelerator. With mushrooming data on the merged company's retention guarantee, advance payment guarantee, performance security, the warehouse was too overtaxed to generate timely reports for decision makers. Moreover, Consolidated Bank of Ghana (CBG) complex data model made building new reports very time consuming-it could take as much as six months to complete. Consolidated Bank of Ghana needed a solution that would deliver more detailed reports more quickly without affecting the performance of underlying operational systems. CBG business users had been building some for their own reports using SAP Business Objects Analysis edition for Microsoft office, which integrates with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. This tool allows ad hoc multidimensional analysis. What these users needed was to be able to build self-service reports from a single source of data and find an efficient way to collate data from multiple sources to obtain an enterprise-wide view of what was going on. CBG decided to migrate its data warehouse from its legacy database to SAP BW powered by SAP Skycrew Technologies, SAP's in-memory database platform, which dramatically improved the efficiency at which data can be loaded and processed, calculations can be computed, and queries and reports can be run. The new data warehouse would be able to integrate with existing SAP ERP applications driving day-to-day business operations. The bank worked with IBM Global Services consultants to cleanse and streamline its existing database. It archived and purged unwanted or unused data, with the IT department working closely with business professionals to jointly determine what was essential, what was still being used, and what data thought to be unused had been moved to a different functional area of the company. Cleansing and streamlining data reduced the database size almost 50 percent, to 9 terabytes. According to Skycrew Technologies, CBG Group leader of Global Business Intelligence, in addition to providing better insights, the new data warehouse environment has achieved a 98% improvement in the production of standard reports. This is due to the 83% reduction in load time to execution time to make the data available, and reduction in execution time to complete the analysis. CBG can now accommodate exploding volumes of data and database queries easily, while maintaining enough processing power to handle unexpected issues. The company is also able to build new reports much faster and the flexibility of SAP makes it much easier to change the company's data model. Now CBG can produce new reports for business users in weeks instead of months and give decision makers the insights they need to boost efficiency and lower operating costs.

Question 1 Give six (6) reasons why a company like the new Consolidated Bank of Ghana would want to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system such as SAP S/4 HANA, and Oracle NetSuite.

Question 2 Describe six (6) benefits of the new Business Intelligence Infrastructure (i.e. Data warehouse) adopted by the Consolidated Bank of Ghana.

Question 3 Why is data quality so important to the managers of the new Consolidated Bank of Ghana? Provide five (5) reasons.