Client: Volkswagen Financial Services

Bluefin have been working with VWFS UK over the last 18 months to enhance, upgrade and support their  business critical ABS solution. In particular this includes delivering a series of changes know as ABS phase II.

Benefits

The changes to the ABS solution have added the following benefits:

• A decrease in the month end load time from twenty four hours to around twelve hours
• The addition of two new cubes to allow increased analysis and management of risk
• An upgrade of the BW and SEM solution
• Improvements in the functionality of the solution, including the ability to carry out a test run of the available pool
• Removal of the dependency on date to ease testing
• Improvements to the general performance

Process

Once the original ABS solution had been live for six months VWFS defined a series of requirements for improvements to the solution. This was known as Phase II but, in order to lesson the risk, was split into a series of managed releases.

Bluefin were asked to implement phase II for VWFS and to provide support for this very complex and high profile solution. The steps involved were as follows:

• Upgrading the system to BW v3.0b was the first priority; this was to allow use of new functionality such as process chains, and to bring the system in line with the rest of VW.
• The requirements for the rest of the project needed to be understood and discussed with the business to enable the solution to be designed.
• The two new cubes were complex with a large quantity of characteristics and data, therefore the design had to be thought about very carefully in order to ensure the performance would be acceptable.
• The build of the solution involved BW, ABAP and BPS work, additional the DataSource for this system is an Oracle database and therefore skills were used to extract data from a third party system.
• Some modifications were made to existing parts of the solution to improve functionality; this meant full regression testing was needed. Additionally aggregates and other tools were used to improve performance.
• Extensive unit testing was needed before the solution could be handed over to the business, this involved working with the Oracle team and carrying out the full month end process.
• Testing any part of the ABS solution has to be very carefully managed as it involves a month end process and the entire process must be run in order to enable accurate testing. Bluefin worked very closely with the business in order to plan and carry out this testing.
• Before going live the two new cubes needed to be filled with data going back to August 2002, each month has over 300,000 records and needed an extraction process before the load so the cut-over needed to be managed carefully.

All the changes, including the upgrade went live in three releases spread over a period of twelve months. Since then Bluefin have continued to support the solution, including managing the critical month end process.

Some further ABS changes will be going live next year as the result of a change to business processes, and the opportunity will be used to enhance the solution further.

About VWFS

Founded in 1994, Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Financial Services AG in Germany, which is itself owned by Volkswagen AG. Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited is the second largest finance division in the Volkswagen Financial Services group of companies, with a balance sheet of ?1.5 billion. VWFS provides financial services to support all the automotive brands within the Volkswagen Group. value for its shareholders.