Niels Simanis is a cost hunter for Danske Bank, one of the largest banking groups in the Nordic countries. He leads a task force of less than ten experts at finding needles in haystacks – and between 2004-2011 they have facilitated savings of more than 150 million Euros.
To bring IT performance up to optimum level of cost effectiveness while enhancing its worth as a tool for Coop’s business.
Action
Entering into a Managed Services agreement with SMT Data in order to get maximum performance out of already installed IT Business Intelligence solutions.
Result
Complete transparency across all parameters of IT usage.
Significant capacity cost reductions in both mainframe and Windows environments
Danske Bank is Denmark’s largest bank. It has 2.2 million private customers and services a significant part of the private, institutional and public sector in Denmark. It also has banking activities in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Ireland and Luxembourg.
Danske Bank has more than 300 branches, and 1,000 ATM’s across the country. The bank employs 6,000 people in Denmark and it is a part of the Danske Bank Group, which employs 22,000 people in 15 countries.
Summary
”If we didn’t have SMT’s software, we’d have had to spend a whole lot of time and effort in gathering that knowledge in other ways.”
”You have to be able to describe an effort and its effect very accurately. Otherwise, it is very hard to get a management like ours to approve anything at all. But that’s where SMT’s software makes it possible for us to paint a scenario with the overview that’s asked for. We’d never be able to do that if we didn’t know the costs. So in this way, SMT’s product has been – and is – an enabler of cost reductions. And we’re talking quite a lot of money. In the years this department has been operative we have saved Danske Bank more than 150 million Euros.”
”We constantly seek what we call normal state of operation. And I don’t believe that’s something you can achieve by hard work alone.
Putting your shoulder to the grindstone doesn’t do the trick. We have to step back – far back – from the detail to get the overview.”
”First we looked at systems. Then we looked at programs. Now we have dug ourselves all the way down to looking at what the compiler of the programs is doing – and we’re starting to look at what can be done about the hardware. So we go everywhere to find optimizations. We have found ways to write programs more efficiently and learn how that affects the processes within the machines.”
