Industry
Financial services
PwC's role
Transform the Bank’s SAP applications, revolutionising management reporting
Driven by
SAP S/4HANA
BNA
A cornerstone of the nation’s economy
The National Bank of Angola (BNA) is the central Bank responsible for issuing and managing Angola's national currency and overseeing the country’s banking system. In addition, the Bank is responsible for the execution, monitoring and control of monetary, exchange and credit policies, payment system management, and ensuring the stability of the Angolan financial system.
Like other central Banks around the world, BNA is challenged to develop optimal monetary policies and support the national economy in the face of tough global economic conditions. Meeting this goal required BNA to take advantage of new technologies, particularly for reporting and cash management. But to unlock these capabilities, the Bank had to optimise its processes and enhance its operations. This required BNA to commence a digital transformation journey, replacing its ageing SAP landscape with state-of-the-art SAP applications – a massive undertaking.
Discover the PwC case study.
“Our previous SAP system was the first of its kind in our country and represented a key milestone in Angola's financial services sector. However, the system was outdated and had high levels of customisation. We initiated a project with the support of our key partners at PwC and SAP to replace the 25-year-old legacy system and build new capabilities to support the Bank's critical work.”
Armindo Fortes
IT Director, Banco Nacional de Angola
The challenge imposed by BNA A high-stakes deployment at the heart of the business
BNA joined forces with PwC to transform their core finance function with its mission-critical SAP applications – including SAP ECC 6, SAP Business Warehouse (BW), SAP BusinessObjects and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) – to the latest versions of SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA. During the conversion we worked closely with SAP (project quality assurance partner), to ensure the correct decisions were taken throughout the implementation period.
Since BNA’s SAP environment supports its core operations and the Angolan economy, it was vital to minimise disruption during the ambitious 12-month project. So for each business process, PwC and BNA weighed up the benefits of aligning with state-of-the-art best practices and introducing automation, versus minimising process changes to reduce disruption for the business and its staff. This is all part of PwC’s broader strategy to help clients solve their most important problems by combining human understanding with the right technology. In all, we documented, migrated and tested 300+ business processes without disrupting BNA’s operations.
Completing such a seamless cutover was only possible due to considerable change management. That’s why PwC trained 500+ people from across BNA and worked closely with financial institutions across Angola.
Armindo Fortes also remarks: “Thanks to the great support by our partners at SAP and PwC, our Bank is well-positioned to deliver on its crucial mandate as a critical driver of Angola’s economy.”
“By prioritising change management and conducting training in real-time throughout the project, we have driven user adoption to ensure the rich functionality unlocked by this implementation reaps real business results.”
Armindo Fortes
IT Director, Banco Nacional de Angola
PwC's technological solution Reducing operational complexity to drive long-term benefits
Why did BNA select PwC as its partner alongside SAP?
Because we demonstrated technical deep knowledge combined with industry insights. We also hired and trained local people to offer support on the ground, who were backed by specialists from our Digital Technology Consulting team in PwC Portugal. In addition, PwC’s approach highlighted the opportunity for a “clean core” (fundamental in the context of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)) and bringing the customer processes to as close to standard as possible (fit-to-standard), in order to take advantage of SAP S/4 HANA new capabilities, replacing old customized processes by new standard and best practice processes during the implementation journey – and as far as the scope of a brownfield implementation could go.
PwC worked with BNA to simplify key business processes, transactions and reports. In addition, we designed a change management and communication protocol to ensure a smooth transition to the new SAP applications. And we worked closely with all of BNA’s internal and external stakeholders impacted by the migration, rolling out the cutover gradually across the Angolan financial sector.
The SAP S/4HANA migration applied SAP’s “brownfield” approach (i.e., ensuring that in the transition process from SAP ECC to SAP S4/HANA, existing data in the system, processes and customizations developed at the software level were preserved. In this way, minimal business interruption was ensured throughout the conversion process). Initially, BNA had planned to replicate its existing environment in the new applications. However, PwC worked with BNA to transform business processes so that it could replace custom developments with standard functionality now available in SAP S/4HANA. This reduces operational complexity and will be cost effective and easier to maintain in the long run.
PwC helped BNA meet its specific business needs by migrating custom functionality to the new SAP applications. An example is BNA’s SAP module for cash management, which is designed to ensure that the treasuries of the country's financial institutions remain within regulatory liquidity limits. We kept this module as standard as possible by modernising it with the new stockroom management capabilities built into SAP S/4HANA.
The BW/4HANA implementation used PwC’s Transform methodology and a “greenfield” approach (approach that aims to reengineer processes with a view to simplifying and fully customizing them according to business needs) – using SAP HANA’s powerful data processing to enable more sophisticated reporting. For example, BNA has bolstered its HR reporting to ensure that any overtime payments are signed off before running the monthly payroll.
The PwC team also upgraded BNA’s integration platform from SAP PI to SAP PO, and converted the integrations with 14 other business systems. This enables highly efficient data exchanges between SAP and non-SAP systems, helping BNA perform reporting and unlock insight from across its business. On top of all of these benefits, the move to SAP S/4HANA has also improved system-wide performance, by cutting the database size by 50+%.
“Our initial goal was to execute the brownfield migration minimising as much as possible process disruption. But along the way we took the chance to add additional value to the customer by bringing processes to the standard best practice, improving efficiency, and solving important problems”
Tito Tavares
Consulting Director, PwC Portugal
The result Unlocking staff productivity by accelerating reporting from days to minutes
Our human-led, tech-powered approach is already delivering results, with significant improvements seen right across BNA. For instance, with PwC’s support, BNA has centralised reporting across several departments – including accounting, market capital, cash management and statistical studies – by introducing SAP BW/4HANA and eliminating data redundancy.
We’ve also introduced extensive analytics capabilities that generate time and cost savings while equipping leaders with detailed business insights as they work to support the Angolan financial system. For example, measuring liquidity across Angolan financial institutions used to require 15 days of spreadsheet work, but SAP S/4HANA now delivers that report in one minute. Another example: analysing BNA’s internal financial data used to take two hours in the old SAP environment, but it now takes five minutes.
What do these improvements mean to BNA?
- Deeper insights to support better decision-making.
- Greater staff productivity, as employees can concentrate on data analysis rather than number-crunching.
- Potential for future improvements, as BNA now has the capability to develop new types of reports, as well as a roadmap for deploying SAP Fiori apps to enable better reporting across all devices.
Critically, BNA has been able to sharpen its business agility, as it can now take advantage of the latest SAP functionality as it’s released. This opens up a whole world of opportunities to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation while tightening security, empowering BNA to continue reaping the benefits of digital transformation for years to come. The overall effect? BNA is in a stronger position to promote the stability of Angola's financial system and make business decisions that allow it to fulfil its institutional purpose.
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