• Anticipate customer requirements by offering new products or services
• Focus marketing initiatives on areas with peak return potential
• Identify new opportunities for cross-selling between commercial and retail divisions
• Avoid committing resources to marginal initiatives
• Increasing credibility with customers
• Promote customer satisfaction by "being on top" of the relationship

Beyond Commercial Banking
"With the data warehouse, commercial bankers look beyond the world of commercial banking and offer customers the total First Citizens experience," Cooper says. For example, the data warehouse's integrated customer snapshot helps FCB bankers recognize that a commercial customer may be purchasing a home. With this key information commercial bankers can promote a home equity line, checking account, or other retail financial product. "The system allows us to recognize and implement new and sometimes fleeting opportunities."

First Citizens Bank was eager to establish a mission-critical data warehouse. But, as in many real-world business environments, the circumstances were less than optimal. First, the bank did not have a DBMS, a database administrator, or any significant DBMS expertise in house at the inception of the project. Second, given its timing requirements, the bank needed an "out-of-the-box" data warehouse experience so that a usable system could be implemented and administered by a single practitioner after only a one-week training period.

First Citizens Bank selected Nucleus as the foundation for its Commercial Banking Data Warehouse after a thorough evaluation. The HDS Professional Services group worked with FCB to facilitate a design process that included a formal Joint Application Development (JAD) session.

The bank evaluated several data warehouse offerings, but selected HDS-Nucleus for three reasons. One, the bank had a solid, long-standing relationship with HDS. With its HDS infrastructure already installed, it was simpler to plug in the Nucleus technology than to staff up and invest in a new platform. Two, FCB concluded that without a data base, a data base administrator, or in-house experience, Nucleus provided a better "out-of-the-box" likelihood of success. Finally, Nucleus offered a unique combination of HDS hardware, software, and professional support for quick and painless implementation.

JAD Requirements
In a JAD session, end users and developers team up for quick and concise system-design effort. First Citizens invited bankers and analysts from several areas, including commercial banking, business, and betail banking, and credit administration to ensure the system addressed real-world requirements. As it turned out, the JAD session was eye-opening in that it revealed seven critical business challenges:

• What makes up an optimum view of a total customer relationship?
• Who are the bank's most profitable customers?
• Who are the bank's most promising new business prospects?
• How can bankers be notified of changes to customer relationships?
• What is the bank's year-to-date performance against goals?
• What products/services are the most/least successful by volume and time?
• What additional information is needed for useful customer statements?

According to Mike Walley, VP of Systems Management, Nucleus allowed First Citizens Bank to develop, test, and deploy in one week. "Nucleus substantially reduced the modeling work required to implement a data warehouse," he says. "It saved us tremendous work, from database design, to programming requirements, to maintenance of front-end tools. Nucleus exceeded our expectations."

Using Nucleus Prototype Mart, data modeling required only two days, while creating the complete system took about a week. "This seven-day effort becomes even more significant considering that a single person with no database experience and a load of other job responsibilities successfully completed the project," Walley notes.

"Nucleus allowed business queries to be developed directly by bank employees in commercial banking and other business units," Walley says. The ability of Nucleus Exploration Mart to allow business questions to be asked of the existing data structure, regardless of initial query design, enables the bank to adapt quickly to changing analysis requirements without requiring any changes to the data design or indexing schemas.

Performance and Storage Management Boosts
First Citizens Bank regards storage management as one of the key benefits of Nucleus. "Nucleus compresses data to 25 percent of its original size and still maintains 100 percent indexing, resulting in storage savings and quick response to queries," Walley says. "Overall, Nucleus exhibited a four-fold query response improvement over other data management alternatives, and, most critically, allowed the application to be developed and run in production with minimum disruption of other IT priorities."

Unix-based HDS systems do the bank's back-end processing while Compaq servers running Windows NT handle the front end. The Nucleus Exploration Suite runs on both 64-bit Unix and 32-bit NT platforms. Analytical software on the front end includes InfoReports and InfoBeacon, two Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools from Platinum Technologies, Oakbrook Terrace, IL.

Business Portfolio Views
The first implementation of the Commercial Banking Data Warehouse was released in April, 1998 and received highly positive comments from FCB's commercial bankers, analysts, and knowledge workers in. First Citizens Bank plans to expand the data warehouse, as it evolves, to embrace other business units, including retail banking, personal banking, and credit administration. In a January 1999 system release, bankers were able to view customers on a business portfolio basis. In all of this, the bank is integrating all account-level information systems into one easy-to-use, business-driven analytical application.

As bankers at FCB become more familiar with the second release of the data warehouse, the bank is experiencing a double benefit. First, bank employees recognize that the data warehouse is highly accurate and contains current operational data. Second, querying the data warehouse has the effect of streamlining a number of semi-automated systems. For example, the Credit Administration business unit relied on a semi-automated system for tracking the credit status of customers. Today, with Nucleus humming along, a monthly process that required three days is now handled via a data warehouse query in less than three hours.