Question:

The Caribbean Bank of Excellence

The Caribbean Bank of Excellence (CBE) was established in Jamaica in 1961. CBE is the first indigenous, the largest financial institution and the leading bank in Jamaica. Due to its outstanding performance locally and regionally, CBE was awarded the title of Best Bank in Jamaica and the Caribbean by Jamaica Financial.

CBE's mission is to locate and serve the Caribbean's regional needs, individual country's national needs, aid the countries' economic growths, and look after its clients' savings. According to CBE's executive manager, Angelina Heavens, "CBE's vision has always been to be the premier bank in the Caribbean, to consistently achieve a superior return for our shareholders, and to bring and deliver world-class products and services to our customers."

CBE is registered as public shareholding companies in three countries, namely Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. Its services include banking, financial, and investment. The company offers a wide range of integrated financial services to individuals, and corporate and institutional customers, including advisory and wealth management services. It offers its services through four primary divisions: personal, corporate, private, and investment. CBE has a diversified local and regional network and connects to other banks internationally.

The banking sector in the individual countries in the Caribbean is competitive. To keep its market share and maintain distance from its nearest competitors, Caribbean Bank of Excellence runs unbeatable marketing campaigns and offers lots of features that meet customers' needs. The old information systems at CBE were limited and were unable to support aggressive campaigns targeting current and potential customers. The marketing department was using old customer databases to launch paper-based mailings as well as short text messages over mobile systems. The customer service systems were of limited help in identifying the most profitable customers as well as potential customers.

Although CBE has maintained its commercial position as the most popular bank in Jamaica and the Caribbean since it was first established, the 2009world economic crisis created serious challenges for them. The bank's IT systems had not been updated in years. The main problem was that each department had its own separate information system, and each private system served its own department; thus, the systems were not integrated and did not meet the organization's overall needs.

These separated and scattered systems led to various problems, especially for the steering committees and top management teams. For example, management teams were unable to update their systems to the latest technologies; the systems were too rigid and inflexible, due to their inability to share information; and it was difficult to flow data and information between different departments within each country. In addition, the old systems in each department were offline and away from the organizational or group work mentality, which created lots of problems from a customer service perspective. Management had no unified picture of the company, and their decisions on how to counteract market changes were slow and costly. The banking sector changes rapidly, and CBE needed to better understand what was going on at the market floor.

Caribbean Bank of Excellence wants to become the technological leader in its field to enable it to continue keeping its name at the top of the list of banks in Jamaica and the Caribbean. In 2007, CBE's management team (Jamaica) began to think about building a new ERP system that spans all of the bank's regional functional areas, executes business processes across the firm, and closes the gaps between top management and operating management teams. CBE executives were convinced that the new ERP system would help the bank to be more flexible and more productive, by coordinating its business processes more closely and integrating groups of processes so that it could focus on efficient resource management and customer service.

In 2019, the new system, called Sunrise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was finally implemented. Sunrise Enterprise Resource Planning is the backbone of Sunrise's business operating systems. The Sunrise ERP software provides the ICT platform for all the software modules that Sunrise's clients need to run their businesses. Sunrise offers a pure cloud computing platform with centralized data storage and on-line applications that can be run from a web browser and do not need to be downloaded or installed. The new system can be upgraded easily, and additional server capacity can be added without a great deal of maintenance. Due to the large amount of important data stored in old and obsolete systems, the system was designed to integrate data from legacy systems for data mining purposes. The ability to integrate with other systems makes Sunrise ERP more flexible and dynamic when dealing with different types of information and new products.

CBE was able to expand its market locally and regionally, opening 5 branches in Jamaica and 11 other branches in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and new countries including Cayman Islands, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and St. Lucia. CBE's local management team believes that Sunrise ERP has enabled CBE to maintain its competitive advantage and that without Sunrise ERP, CBE would have been unable to expand its market locally or regionally.

Questions:

1 a. How has Caribbean Bank of Excellence (CBE) benefitted from the implementation of Sunrise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)?

1 b. What are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing the Sunrise ERP system at CBE.

2."Caribbean Bank of Excellence wants to become the technological leader in its field to enable it to continue keeping its name at the top of the list of banks in Jamaica and the Caribbean."

a. What is Caribbean Bank of Excellence's business model?

b. Which strategic business objective(s)was pursued, is being pursued and should be pursued by Bank of Excellence?

c. State the information system strategy/ies that was being employed and should be considered to deal with the competitive forces. Justify your answers.

3. "In 2019, the new system, called Sunrise ERP was finally implemented." What technology, management and organization factors must be considered and/or contribute to Bank of Excellence's decision with respect to the implementation of the ERP system?

4. What are the ethical, social and political issues due to the implementation of Sunrise ERP?

5. State whether Caribbean Bank of Excellence should continue to pursue the ERP solution that was thought about in 2007and implemented in 2019. Justify your answer. Describe any additional or alternative solutions that should be considered.

6a. How well is Caribbean Bank of Excellence prepared for the future? Justify your answer.

6b. How do you think CBE's business would have developed if it had not integrated Sunrise ERP? Justify your answer.

6c. Is CBE's competitive advantage sustainable? Justify your answer.

Let X1, X2, . .. bei.i.d. U|0, 1] random variables. Define X,= n Xi. (a) Show, by the Weak Law of Large Numbers, that X converges in distribution to 1/2. (b) Show, by the Weak Law of Large Numbers, that n- E, X? converges in distribution to 1/3. (c) Show, by the Central Limit Theorem, that Vn (X, - 1/2) con- verges in distribution to a /(0, 1/12) random variable. (d) The Central Limit Theorem asserts that n-1/2 C" (X? - 1/3) converges in distribution to a random variable Z. Specify the distribution of Z.Problem 1 Let X1, . .. , X, " - p(x; 0) - (1+02). 143obs - # 0 a 1+b 1 ta b 21