Malayan Banking Berhad (Maybank) is Southeast Asia’s fourth largest bank in terms of assets. It is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and is Malaysia’s largest company in terms of market capitalisation. The Maybank Group has a global network of over 2,200 offices in 20 countries, including all 10 ASEAN countries.

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Maybank processed contracts manually using different processes in each of its multinational locations, which made consolidated reporting extremely difficult. They needed an automated solution that their personnel would readily adopt and that would provide faster processing, thus improving cash flow. They also needed much easier reporting for analyses, improving their ability to negotiate new contracts, mitigate risk, assure compliance, enhance bargaining leverage, improve employee productivity, increase customer satisfaction and possibly extend the supplier relationship in order to create new business opportunities and value for both the bank and its suppliers.

With 40,000 employees handling contracts in 2,200 offices for over 22 million customers in 20 countries, manual contract processing was becoming all but impossible for Maybank. Every department in each location in every region had their own processes for keeping and tracking contracts, meaning each inquiry required time-consuming, manual intervention. The likelihood of losing paper-based contracts was very high. According to Herbert Poh Cher Hian, head of Maybank’s Group Finance Strategy & Systems, “This exposed the bank to reputation risk, legal risk, losses that would otherwise have been avoidable and a significant loss of bargaining power that would have been available with better control over our information.”

Physical copies of contracts were being passed around. Filing was inconsistent and some were eventually lost entirely. Without the correct tools in place, it was difficult to have any control over the entire contract management process. There was also no possible way of establishing an effective disaster recovery strategy. This motivated Maybank to seek a solution that would streamline and align processes across the entire Maybank Group.

Maybank’s chief information officer, Tan Kok Meng, adds: “The team achieved much greater economies of scale by establishing one standard solution across all markets served by Maybank. This will deliver greater value to our stakeholders and customers on a continuing basis.”

The desired solution would provide comprehensive automation of contract processing and management workflow. Contracts would be initiated on the system, changes tracked, service level agreements (SLAs) established and enforced. Anyone delaying the completion of a contract would be readily identified and contacted. Maybank would be able to actively and aggressively track contract expiration and identify vendors with whom the bank had the most significant relationships. Digitisation of all contracts would ensure no loss of information and would ensure an effective disaster recovery and continuation of business strategy.

Since their time-to-value window was very narrow, Maybank required a solution that was quick to deploy, easy to customise and readily interfaced to existing back-end systems. It also needed a familiar and comfortable interface that users would readily adopt and use. “We needed to establish a consistent operation across multiple regions to enable a strong level of collaboration,” says Poh Cher Hian.

After evaluating several platform solutions, Maybank determined that Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Extended CRM with the xRM Framework would be the ideal environment in which to build its solution. Microsoft Dynamics CRM was chosen based on these factors:

• Familiar navigation, easy to use application
• Flexible framework helps expedite solution design, development and delivery
• Microsoft Sure Step methodology and agile deployment approach allows for tailoring the solution based directly on user requirements and progressive input
• Lowest total cost of ownership for a solution that complies thoroughly with all Maybank requirements.

Maybank engaged Microsoft Gold Competency Partner, Asterisk Business Systems, to help deploy and customise the software to create their contracts management solution. “The deployment time for the contract management tool (CMT) solution was under six months,” says Rosley Abd Aziz, assistant vice president of Group Finance Strategy & Systems.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provided the core database functionality required to track vendors and customers entering into procurement and property contracts with Maybank. Asterisk interfaced Microsoft SharePoint to provide a repository for the actual contract documents using Microsoft SQL Server as the back-end database to assure scalability and speed.

Poh Cher Hian notes that he was both surprised and very pleased at how relatively little customisation was required to realise the solution. He also appreciated how much flexibility and power the platform provides in processing, accessing and summarising data regarding their contracts. He similarly emphasises how quickly the team was able to deploy the solution across the entire region. “Since the Dynamics CRM user interface is so similar to the other Microsoft Office products our people use, they were able to start using it with very little training,” he says.

“The xRM Framework is a very flexible platform. It’s about intelligence. If you look at a customer, you want to know everything about that customer, so you can develop a relationship with them. The same principle applies to the supply chain. You want to know everything about your supplier. You look for something you can use to manage each supplier, gain insight about your suppliers and obtain an entire, end-to-end view of each supplier. After all, they may also be my customer!”

Powered by Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Extended CRM with the xRM Framework and built by Maybank and their partners at Asterisk Business Systems, represents a dramatic change in the way the banking group manages contracts. “Reducing the time it takes to find contracts, eliminating time-consuming repetition of work and correcting errors and making contracts instantly available, all this alone represents a dramatic improvement in productivity achieved by moving from paper to our CMT,” says Poh Cher Hian.

Taking Maybank from manual, paper-based processes to a fully digitised, fully automated solution has eliminated lost contracts, accelerated initial processing, enabled consolidated reporting, increased bargaining power through better information availability and assured rapid, ready disaster recovery. The project has even resulted in Maybank being awarded the Asian Banker 'Best Reporting and Compliance Implementation' award for its use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Other benefits include:

•  Automated entry, processing and contract workflow significantly increases users’ productivity. Maybank estimates that the time required to process each new contract has been reduced by as much as 80%; enabling a significant increase in contract volume without an increase in staff
• Maybank has achieved process and procedure consistency across the entire region, giving all authorised employees full visibility of the complete relationship with each vendor. This results in far greater leverage and effectiveness when negotiating terms and prices
• Significantly improved reporting of contract renewal and expiration has resulted in dramatic improvements in cash flow management
• Not having to invest excessive time in locating contract documents gives users more time to focus on the right contract milestones and action items
• Eliminating lost contracts has removed much exposure to reputational risk, legal risk, customer satisfaction challenges and other ramifications stemming from inefficient handling of information
• The xRM Framework-based solution has significantly reduced the overall cost of managing contracts by accelerating the time it takes to process each contract and by reducing and almost eliminating entirely the cost of extensive software customisations
• Decision support for Maybank executives has put the needed information at their fingertips, allowing them to make right decisions more quickly. This benefits the bank and all stakeholders.