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would be very good at sorting that kind of lending.What we do is get a customer, find out what they want and work out a way of giving it to them.'
The society decided to look for a supplier that had 'met lots of different and diverse challenges', and built a system with the functionality and flexibility to be able to meet these. 'Therefore we ended up with Tieto, who actually were the main supplier in the marketplace.' BBS opted for the vendor'sMortgage and Savings Suite. Jenkins was keen to emphasise that there was nothing wrong with the systems that had been overlooked and stressed the risk involved in any selection process. 'You can only cover so much of the risk you make in that choice before you commit and say we'll have to go with it. You don't know how any of them are really going to work until the implementation of it in practice.'
The selection process lasted around six months before the deal was signed in mid-2006. 'It's one of those things where you don't have to do it by a given date. You've got to take long enough to be sure that you're doing the right thing, but the problem is if you take too long you lose momentum on it.'
Implementation
The implementation commenced in November of that year with a planned completion date for the end of 2007. It was handled by a team made up of BBS and Tieto staff, there were essentially two people from the vendor on site for the duration of the project. The mutual decided to split the implementation into two phases. It tackled the mortgages side as the first stage before moving on to savings. The mortgages phase of the project was scheduled to go live in July 2007. However, this was delayed by one month as BBS was not confident it had done all the testing that it wanted to do. The savings implementation also slipped, resulting in the system going fully live in April 2008.
The main problems with the implementation centred on freeing up the available resources. This was compounded by the large number of mortgage interest rate changes that needed to be made during the project, as these took the staff away from the Tieto implementation.While Jenkins admitted this set the project back a little, he was relieved that the project completed when it did. 'The truth is I'm delighted that we weren't trying to do this project in the recession.We finished it just before the trouble started.'