Case study

Training Simulation Enables Dunfermline Building Society to ‘Hit the Ground Running’

Client: Dunfermline Building Society
Simulated Systems: Core production system
Simulations Uses: Requirements Gathering, Training

Overview

The purpose of this case study is to show how Dunfermline Building Society implemented a new groupwide platform using a Verisim simulation for requirements gathering and training ahead of the system’s go-live date.

Background

Established in 1869, Dunfermline Building Society (DBS) is Scotland’s largest building society and plays an important part in the savings and mortgage market in Scotland with more than 350,000 members throughout the UK. It has assets of £2bn+ and a network of 34 branches and 38 agencies.

DBS is committed to delivering a high level of service to its customers and delivering value to its members. A key element of this commitment is underpinned by investment in IT and training for its employees.

Challenges

Dunfermline Building Society undertook a groundbreaking initiative to replace its existing branch, mortgage, investment and insurance systems used by all of its employees. A major consideration was to replace legacy systems and cut down on hardware and license costs.

It decided in favour of a powerful new system which would provide it with a better- integrated and more flexible alternative – offering increased efficiency and providing more accurate customer profiling and targeting.

The ambitious nature and sheer scale of the project required a new approach to design and development and training. In particular, DBS was keen to facilitate training alongside the new system’s development – before it was completed, tested and deployed – so they could ‘hit the ground running’ on the go live date.

Solution

Verisim was chosen as a key technology partner to build a fully functional simulation of the proposed new system from documentation only. Verisim’s simulation technology allows it to do this – it doesn’t have to wait to capture and copy the live system.

This proved highly beneficial to DBS as the simulation proved invaluable in helping establish the true requirements for the system design.

The next natural step was to enhance the simulation and refine it into a training tool and hook it up to Verisim’s training plug-ins.

Features

The end result was a sophisticated training simulation which helped employees learn their role, let them experience how the live system behaved and then tested them on their understanding. Its features included:

• capable of Intranet, CDROM or PC deployment - negates the need for parallel environments
• suitable for classroom-based training and long-term branch-based reinforcement training
• provided HR with a reporting dashboard with centralized view of training progress

Benefits

Training started four months ahead of delivery of the full production environment bringing the following key benefits to DBS:

• better prepared staff
• branch readiness to ‘hit-the-ground-running’
• lower risk re the deployment of this key project
• reduced costs of training
• significant savings due to saving development time by using simulation as a prototyping tool

Stewart Cooper, General Manager of Operations at Dunfermline Building Society, said:

“We simply didn’t believe that this kind of approach to training was actually possible!”