AIB Better Ireland Application Management Solution

AIB’s Better Ireland Programme provides charitable donations to community schemes tackling issues of social exclusion in the following three areas:

• Children affected by drug/alcohol abuse.
• Lack of Children’s education through poverty.
• Children who are homeless.

Since the introduction of the scheme in August 2001 nearly €14.5m has been awarded to over 1,400 community projects throughout Ireland.  It is estimated that the Better Ireland Programme donated a further €1.5m in 2007.

The Challenge

Historically, AIB’s Brand Management team accepted year-round applications for funding under the Better Ireland Programme. Eligible community schemes applied for grants either by completing an online form or by returning a completed application (paper-based) form to their local branch. This subsequently resulted in a large volume of manual data entry and maintenance via a legacy system.

Going forward, the Brand Management team was looking to change aspects of the operation of the Better Ireland Programme to broaden its scope. In this context, the Brand Management Team were aiming to improve the management and administration of received applications whilst reducing the need to re-key application information, and overall, to automate as much of the process as possible.

To that end, System Dynamics were engaged by AIB to deliver a solution to enable the Better Ireland Programme Team within Brand Management to receive and process applications, and thereby streamline grant funding to charitable and community organisations.

The Approach

System Dynamics collaborated closely with both the Brand Management team and the IT Department in AIB, to identify the key requirements of the application and associated business processes, specifically in the areas of data specification, user roles, application lifecycle management (workflow), reporting, letter generation and interaction with third parties, such as external PR agencies.

In addition, System Dynamics worked with AIB to ensure that rigid project controls and document sets were established and maintained for project governance, that were aligned with both AIB and System Dynamics project management methodologies.

The Solution

The solution comprised of two main aspects:

• A public-facing online form, for capture of all data required for an application for funding under the Better Ireland Programme.
• A browser-based Application Management Solution, that allowed the Brand Management team to review and process applications received via the online form.

The Application Management Solution streamlined the end-to-end processing of funding applications and associated correspondence for the Better Ireland Programme. With the deployment of the solution, the Brand Management team could more efficiently review, assess and process all applications received by the Programme, a process made more effective by the inclusion of a standard, automated workflow.

In addition, the solution provided the team with a mechanism to generate template-based correspondence automatically, and provided a feature rich reporting suite to present management information based on specific criteria. The system also provided mechanisms to transfer and receive planning information from third party PR agencies.

The solution was subject to a rigorous Quality Assurance phase consisting of unit, system and integration testing, user acceptance testing and full end-to-end production testing. System Dynamics worked closely with AIB’s IT Department in this regard, and throughout the project lifecycle, in particular to ensure compliance with AIB’s standards with respect to technical design and security.

The project successfully went live in February 2008, in line with the project specifications and schedule.

The Benefits

The roll-out of the Application Management Solution has resulted in several tangible benefits to AIB, both immediate and longer-term. Some of these include the following:

• The provision of a single centralised repository for all application data and associated collateral for the Brand Management team.
• Easy access to application data for search, processing, and reporting.
• Automated letter generation reduced the need for manual entry and re-entry.
• Management reports provide point-in-time and historical summary views of applications, in various formats, with various report criteria.
• Applications received during a defined timeframe, to allow the Programme to operate to a shorter, defined lifecycle, with more efficient resource utilisation.
• Provision of a stable, scalable platform on which AIB can grow the Better Ireland Programme and associated staff base.