Before Franchise Connect, Citi’s Latin American operation ran on islands of information — three separate BI stacks, each answering only its own corner of the business: Qlikview dashboards for CSC Connect; Business Objects dashboards for Cards, Citiservice, ICG and Markets; and Excel reports for Trade, ASU, Cash, Cards and CitiService. Management’s view was too limited to support decisions. The deeper problems compounded each other:

• Static, non-standard dashboards: no visual or analytical standard, and different areas used different concepts and indicators — with performance problems in the Qlikview and Business Objects apps.
• Slow reporting: report generation was slowed by manual updates, checks and validations.
• No single version of the truth: the same indicator carried different numbers in each system, and no one could say which was valid or trustworthy.
• Tools that didn’t fit, weren’t maintained, and weren’t future-ready: none fit the business fully, all demanded heavy operational effort to maintain, many went unused, and none could support scenario analysis, data mining, prediction, new data types, emerging APIs or advanced analytics for data scientists.

The Objective

Build a single application capable of unifying those large islands of information and handling the data volumes of the whole region — letting users instantly analyze the composition and variation of indicators sliced by region, country, business unit, service, product, commercial condition and more.

The Solution

AYNITECH delivered a single tracking-and-monitoring tool serving the CitiLatam region’s information needs, with management dashboards for every Franchise Connect area on web and mobile. Underneath it sat a broad-spectrum data warehouse that not only loaded the required source systems but built a complete infrastructure for both current and future needs, and a data model that homogenizes data captured from different sources, enriches its analytical content and guarantees data quality. Every manual process was automated.

The Results in Numbers

• User adoption was high — more than 1,000 daily accesses on average, a 75% increase
• Response times improved to roughly 3 seconds, an 80% improvement
• Nightly processing sped up by more than 50%

Alongside the numbers, the project raised the performance and usability of the decision-support tool, eliminated the development burden of the previous BI tools, made highly complex business information simple to present, and consolidated decision support on a single point of truth.