Case Study: Laboral Kutxa

Empowerment of the Business

The innovative Spanish bank replaces Microsoft Word and Visual Basic solutions with Papyrus

Business Results

• Empowerment of business users
• Fast Time-to-market
• Major cost reductions due to reusability
• Ease-of-change
• Dynamic and personalized communication

Snapshot

• Organization: Laboral Kutxa
• Business Challenge: Lack of consolidated platform for Business Users, lack of Operative System independency
• Goals: Give Business Users the control and opportunity to create and modify all types of communications to achieve fast time-to-market
• Integration: WebServer HTTPs
• Solution: Papyrus Communications and Process Platform

The Company

LABORAL Kutxa is an innovative Spanish bank that looks to the future - a different entity that believes there is always another way. With more than 300 offices and around 1.500.000 customers, LABORAL Kutxa cooperative bank is the third largest financial institution in the Basque Country and the third largest credit union in Spain. What sets the bank apart, is its commitment to people and society and its direct involvement in shaping the future of the community to which it belongs.

The Challenge

In the past, LABORAL Kutxa business users were creating business correspondence using Microsoft Word and a solution based on Visual Basic. Unfortunately, neither of the tools was well suited for the complex business communications of the LABORAL Kutxa enterprise environment. It was not possible to update the version of the complete flow or to move to a different operating system, and it was extremely difficult to make a change. Because document elements were physically embedded in document templates, each change had to be performed in all document templates containing the original text - one by one. As customer expectations grew, so did the need for greater flexibility and faster time to market, which could not be achieved with the existing solutions.

The Solution

The new Papyrus-based solution meets all requirements of the bank, including easy document template design by business users, variable definitions, version control, data-driven inclusion of dynamic content, and more. The solution was created in the LABORAL Kutxa Papyrus communication system for Batch and Online by simply adding nodes for the Correspondence Framework Solution and the Portal. The Portal is used for the online generation of documents, where bank clerks can simply log-in and ask for a certain document that is automatically generated, converted to PDF and sent to the user in the portal.

Speed, efficiency and ease-of-use

By leveraging the Papyrus Business Designer for non-technical users, the business team at LABORAL Kutxa mastered transition from Word to the Papyrus Business Designer in a very short time. Although dealing with very complex business communication with many different clauses and tables with dynamic rows, columns, and variables, business administrative users were able to create all needed communication without involving IT.

Working with the Business Designer makes it easy to design, maintain, change and sign-off templates, layouts, tables and text building blocks. Business users work with re-usable building blocks and WYSIWYG, drag & drop GUIs, and when there is a new document template to create, they almost never need to start from scratch. With a direct access to the central library of building blocks and templates, they can choose the components they need, and work with intuitive GUIs to create elements that are new. Document templates are quickly assembled by dragging and dropping elements from the library, and defining natural language rules and conditions - all with the same tool and the same team.

Interactive forms and layouts with elements that should appear on every page or only on the first, last, even or odd pages, etc. are created by the same tool, and PDFs taken into the system and added to a document as a native PDF.

Dynamic tables

Dynamic tables were created with indexed variables to be repeated depending on the data, so that business users can work with tables without asking IT to prepare the complex table structures beforehand. The team at LABORAL Kutxa went even further, and designed dynamic tables with corporate colours and data-driven dynamic columns, which is really innovative, as normally dynamic tables would have dynamic rows, but not also columns.

Composing Document Templates with Business Designer

Built-in Versioning & Change Management

New document templates contain only links to document building blocks, so when there is a change, it is done only in one place – in the original building block itself. The update is automatically mirrored in all document templates and building blocks using the modified element. The affected elements are automatically collected by the system and pushed through the Change Management Workflow for testing and simulation all the way to production. Once they pass the change management process, they are available in production and can be used in batch, online and interactive communication by business departments in their daily work.

Consolidated Batch, Online and Interactive Communications Delivery

The new solution was configured to re-use the workflows for existing Online and Batch processes at the bank - this way, documents coming from business users and documents from the technical tool design for Online and Batch are treated as part of the same delivery process.

Multi-Language Building Blocks & Documents

LABORAL Kutxa works in Spanish, Euskera and English, and uses the Papyrus multi-language capability to create all templates and building blocks in multiple languages. In production, the system automatically collects correct building blocks and generates the final document in desired language(s) as required. Please see an example of a document using two languages: Basque on the left, and Spanish on the right.

Multi-language documents

Next Steps

As next, LABORAL Kutxa plans to enable inclusion of free texts in documents before being sent to the customer, which will allow for even more flexibility and more personalization in the customer communication.