Rosselkhozbank transferred all employees to P7-Office

2023

Completion of transfer to P7-Office of all employees

Rosselkhozbank has implemented more than 27 thousand licenses for an office environment with expanded functionality for joint work and communication "P7-Office." This was announced on November 22, 2023 by representatives of the bank to TAdviser.

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According to them, office software in Rosselkhozbank occupies a key place, since daily bank employees work with a huge number of documents. The approximate document flow is about 40 million sheets per year. The ability to continue working immediately and without loss was extremely important during the period when foreign software suppliers announced their departure from the country.

When choosing the right software, Rosselkhozbank employees were guided by two main parameters: the presence of a generally recognized document format and the ease of switching to a new solution.

The implementation of P7-Office was carried out in stages. In 2021, a pilot deployment of software was carried out, full testing began in 2022, and industrial scaling began in 2023. As of November 22, 2023, the bank completed the transfer to the domestic "P7-Office" of all its employees.

We tested and implemented the solution on our own. Firstly, for these tasks we have enough competencies for our IT specialists, and secondly, the implementation process itself turned out to be publicly available. Thanks to the compatibility of the solution with all known formats, as well as a convenient interface, the introduction of P7-Office passed quite quickly, - said Vadim Grigorenko, Managing Director of the Information Technology Department of Rosselkhozbank.

For the coming years, Rosselkhozbank defines one of the vectors for further development as an increase in the intensity of import substitution. In addition to switching to Russian office packages, the bank plans to introduce Russian operating systems, database management systems, as well as virtualization systems.

P7-Office Implementation Details

On July 11, 2023, R7-Office and Rosselkhozbank (RSHB) shared details on the project to introduce the P7-Office office suite into the bank's infrastructure .

Banking involves working with a huge number of documents. Therefore, office software in Rosselkhozbank has always occupied a key place. The approximate annual document flow in the bank is about 40 million sheets. For many years, the organization used different versions of MS Office. In 2021, it was decided to transfer the infrastructure to Russian software products.

When choosing the appropriate software, they were guided by two main parameters:

• Generally recognized document formats. The bank is not a closed structure. Many documents go beyond internal use, so it was important to use popular formats for most. And since 99% of all documents are created in Microsoft - Open XML format, appropriate support was needed in the software being implemented.
• Ease of transition to new programs. It was important that users switch to the product as quickly as possible, without long training and addiction. That is, great importance was attached to the similarity of the interface with Microsoft products.

The choice of "P7-Office" forced the bank to review and organize all its documentation. Microsoft products use the VBA language, and P7-Office uses JavaScript. The semantics of languages ​ ​ are similar and you can easily translate macros from one language to another. However, you first need to audit, check all existing macros and understand which ones are worth leaving and which ones are not. The bank's specialists performed a full check and made the necessary corrections. This helped optimize workflows and prevent errors even before they appeared.

Errors in working with bank documentation can lead not only to temporary costs, but also to financial losses. To eliminate the slightest likelihood of errors, they were implemented in stages.

Stage One: Focus Group Selection and Trial Pilot Run

In 2021, immediately after the selection of P7-Office by the office suite standard, the bank began pilot deployment of software for a focus group of up to 1000 users. The pilot launch took about a year, since the banking structure is quite complex and has a large amount of documentation. The main task was to find out how suitable the office suite is for the bank in principle.

On average, the bank uses more than 500 + standard and standard documents - tables, forms, presentations, forms, etc. It was necessary to check that each individual document was displayed correctly: the text is readable, the formulas are calculated correctly, the inserts are not distorted, and so on.

In addition, it was important that the recipient of the document could open a document created in other office editors. It was necessary to verify that each document does not change when opened and is displayed in its original form.

It was also necessary to make sure that the software could be integrated with other banking products and a secure bank printing system. Information when printed or transmitted to other programs should have remained unchanged.

The P7-Office printing system was easily integrated into the existing bank printing system in compliance with all the necessary security parameters. Integration with internal banking systems was also successfully configured.

After checking all documents for correct display under different conditions and eliminating integration errors, the pilot launch ended.

Stage Two: Full Testing

In 2022, the bank began full testing. For a whole year, the participants worked exclusively with P7-Office. At the same time, constant control over the use of the product was maintained. They evaluated both the quality of work tasks and the usability of employees.

Due to the external similarity of the interface with well-known foreign solutions, users were able to quickly switch to a new product. This helped to avoid the time cost of additional employee training.

Testing also helped assess the need for regular technical support. As practice has shown, with the correct installation of the software, there are no malfunctions and constant support is not required.

At the end of the annual testing, it was concluded that P7-Office completely closes the bank's requirements for working with documents.

Stage Three: Scaling Deployment

In 2023, a large-scale deployment of the product began. As of July 2023, about 30% of the organization's employees (approximately 6 thousand people) worked at P7-Office. By the end of 2023, it is planned to increase this number to 70-80%.

The current installation is running on Windows, but the possibility of migrating to Linux is being considered. That is, P7-Office performs another task - it supports the target infrastructure on Russian operating systems. Due to the fact that the P7-Office licenses support installation on all types of popular OS, including Russian ones, you can choose any suitable option.

Following the implementation, Rosselkhozbank fully solved all the tasks set. It was possible to seamlessly transfer employees to other software and achieve uninterrupted work with documents of all known formats.

Changing the office suite to a Russian product showed how effective import substitution can be when choosing the right solution. We managed to take into account all the needs of the bank and optimize the implementation of important tasks. Of course, it may seem that as many as two years to implement an office suite is a lot. However, we needed to check the display of each document and the correctness of each process. Given this, we can say that we coped as soon as possible, - said Sergey Subachev, Chief information officer of Rosselkhozbank JSC

By the end of 2023, Rosselkhozbank plans to completely switch to the P7-Office office suite. By using the compatibility of the solution with all known formats, as well as a convenient interface, product implementation is fast enough.