ISIS PAPYRUS CASE STUDIES

BANK OF SCOTLAND
A standardized printing solution using Papyrus

Bank of Scotland, established in 1695 is one of the oldest surviving UK clearing banks. Recently, the Bank started a project to re-engineer its branch accounting system on MVS. Papyrus DocEXEC was chosen to format the different documents. Papyrus Designer develops and tests the document applications in a PC environment before being loaded in exactly the same format onto the mainframe for production formatting and printing.

The Customer

The Bank of Scotland group includes Capital Bank plc, Bank of Wales plc and Bank of Western Australia Ltd. Its headquarters are in Edinburgh and the Bank employs approximately 21,000 staff within the group. In 1999-2000, the Bank’s UK market share rose to 7%, the 19th consecutive increase.

The Requirements

Bank of Scotland’s branch accounting system dated back to the 1970’s and was in need of replacement. As a consequence of purchasing a solution, it was established that files produced for customer statements and letters within the new system could not be satisfactorily printed on the Bank’s printers in their raw state.

Consequently, the Print Presentation team within Bank of Scotland conducted an investigation of document composition vendors to find a solution that could interpret the new data files and adequately convert them quickly into the application.

Decision Criteria for Papyrus

Papyrus was chosen as the document composition solution as it was able to fulfill the Bank’s main criteria, which included, support for the Bank’s new data files, speed of application development, one application with multiple printstreams, and ease of use. When you add the strength of the underpinning architecture - IBM’s AFP, the complete “end to end” business document solution and the ISIS track record of continued innovative development, it was clear that choosing Papyrus was the correct decision in the short term and for the future.

The Solution

Bank of Scotland will, under the new system, produce all their bank statements, letters and certificates with Papyrus. Development for the project is currently performed in a PC environment using Papyrus Designer, then loaded onto the mainframe. With Papyrus, the source code remains the same on any platform, and therefore the WYSIWYG design developed using Papyrus Designer is exactly the same on MVS. Papyrus DocEXEC on MVS formats the documents, which are printed on IBM 3900 printers using Papyrus Host.

On average, 50,000 statements are printed per night. Over time, more banking product documentation will be produced using the Papyrus solution.

Capital Bank plc, who were previously Doc1 users, will migrate their existing solutions into Papyrus. They will produce the documentation relating to all new account applications with Papyrus.

The Benefits

With Papyrus, the document design and development was completed quickly and easily after a one week workshop delivered by ISIS. This saved Bank of Scotland a lot of time and resources, leading to cost savings.

“Bank of Scotland chose Papyrus for its user friendliness and the speed that development could be completed. Within 2 weeks, our statement development was done, and we were ready to run test data through the Papyrus solution. In previous years it may have taken two months to write this application. We were able to design it quickly using Papyrus and we are very happy with our choice of solution,” says Adrian Quinn, Senior Technical Analyst at Bank of Scotland.