Alfa Bank

Established in 1990, Alfa Bank is a universal banking institution that offers all main types on banking operations available at the market of financial services including servicing individuals and corporate clients, investment banking business, trade financing, and asset management.

The Alfa Bank banking group maintains its position of Russia’s largest private bank by the size of overall capital, credit portfolio, and clients’ assets.

Since the number of the customers that use our bank’s cash collection services has been growing, we made a decision to automate operations of the cash collection service in Moscow and the Moscow region.

We pursued the following goals:

• to reduce transport costs;
• to boost efficiency of cash collection crews owing to development of optimal routes and monitoring of movements of vehicles, to increase the number of trips and the number of visited outlets without increasing the number of crews;
• to reduce the labor input of employees needed for developing daily routes of vehicles.

To select a contractor, we conducted a tender where the CDC group of companies presented its proprietary product — Optimum GIS (Geoinformation system). The system includes the ‘Delivery’ and ‘Active monitoring’ modules. Unlike other solutions that were presented at the tender, Optimum GIS is the only system that fully fulfils the set of the specified requirements and provides vast options for making customized enhancements related to specific features of our project.

Using the Optimum system we have successfully resolved the following issues:

• created a system that automatically generates routes using data on the schedule of operations of cash-collection crews and requests for cash collection services;
• developed a process for accounting requests in an electronic form;
• made routes denser owing to automatic optimization and reduction in idle running of vehicles;
• reduced the time needed to generate and optimize cash collection routes;
• reduced the time needed for adding an ‘urgent’ request to routes;
• created a system for monitoring the state and location of crews (about 200 vehicles are equipped with GPS trackers for all regions);
• increased efficiency of dispatchers; and reduced the time needed for reporting.

A specific feature of the project is that the system has been connected to the CAN bus of armored vehicles to collect data on fuel consumption, mileage, and other parameters via the universal programmable controller CAN-LOG.

It should be separately noted that, as part of the project, Optimum GIS has been integrated with Alfa Bank’s corporate information system. The system, Cash-processing center hardware/software facility, is a third-party product; therefore, it was of importance for us to have the integration fulfilled in the way of direct cooperation between CDC’s specialists and developers of the facility. Owing to the expertise and skills of CDC’s specialists, the two-way integration has been implemented within the shortest time possible.

After start of Optimum GIS productive operations we have conducted assessment and will continue using in current operations of cash-collection services the Delivery and Active Monitoring program products. In the nearest future, we plan to expand the system to other Russian cities.

We are grateful to all those who participated in the project. We especially note the high skills of CDC specialists Andrey Tyugashov and Maxim Khramenkov.

Natalya Makarova

Deputy head, Security block Alfa-Bank’s director for cash-collection