MANAGEMENT INFORMATION

SYSTEMS

PROJECT REPORT
ON
BANKISLAMI PAKISTAN LTD

PREPARED BY:
Aziz Khan (SP13-EX-0064)

SUBMITTED TO:
Prof.Manuj Kumar

DATE OF SUBMISSION:
24-July-2016

INTRODUCTION TO THE BIPL

The epochal idea of BankIslami was conceptualized by Jahangir Siddiqui & Company
Limited and Randeree family in late 2003. Mr. Hasan A. Bilgrami was appointed as
Adviser to the sponsors on March 16, 2004 to formalize the idea. He presented the
concept paper of BankIslami to sponsors on March 24, 2004. A detailed business plan
was then prepared and a formal application was submitted to the State Bank of Pakistan
on May 26, 2004. On September 26, 2005, Dubai Bank joined the Sponsors and became
one of the founding shareholders of BankIslami by investing 18.75% in the total Capital.
The State Bank of Pakistan issued a No Objection Certificate in no time on August 19,
2004 and BankIslami Pakistan Limited, the second full-fledge Islamic Commercial Bank
in Pakistan, was incorporated on October 18, 2004 in Pakistan.
BankIslami Pakistan Limited was the first Bank to receive the Islamic Banking license
under the Islamic Banking policy of 2003 on March 31, 2005. The Bank envisioned to
focus primarily on Wealth Management as the core area of business in addition to Shariah
compliant Retail Banking products, Proprietary and Third party products, and Integrated
financial planning services.
BankIslami Pakistan Limited made a public offering of Rs. 400 Million, at par, from 6th
to 8th March 2006. This was the first primary issue by a Bank in over a decade in
Pakistan. The Initial public offering (IPO) of BankIslami received overwhelming
response from the general public as the applications received were 9 times higher than
offered, fetching nearly Rs. 3.5 Billion, against the demand of Rs. 400 Million.
The State Bank of Pakistan declared BankIslami Pakistan Limited as a Scheduled Bank
with effect from March 17, 2006. BankIslami started its Banking operations on 7th April
2006 with its first branch in SITE, Karachi. By the end of 2006, the Bank had 10
branches, nine in Karachi and one in Quetta. The Bank further concentrated in building a
nationwide network and by the end of year 2007, its branch network grew to 36 branches
in 23 cities. In 2008, the Bank opened 66 new branches nationwide which expanded its
network to 102 branches in 49 cites. By the end of 2014, the Bank has achieved the target
of 213 branches in 80 cities nationwide This gave BankIslami the distinction of having
the fastest expanding network in Pakistan as well as offering the widest network by any
Islamic Bank.On May 7. 2015 State Bank of Pakistan approved the amalgamation of
KASB Bank with and into BankIslami. With this amalgamation all 104 branches of
KASB Bank were merged into BankIslami making it the country's 11th largest banking
network with 317 branches in 93 cities in a short span of 9 years.

THE VISION AND MISSION STATEMENT

Vision statement:
The Vision of BankIslami is to be recognized as the leading Authentic Islamic Bank

Mission statement:
The Mission of BankIslami is to create value for our stakeholders by offering Authentic
Shariah Compliant and technologically advanced product and services.We differentiate ourselves
through:
Authenticity
Innovation
Understanding our client's needs
Commitment to excellence, and
Fast, efficient and seamless delivery of solution. As a growing institution, the foundation
for our performance lies on our human capital and BankIslami remains committed to
becoming an employer of choice, attracting, nurturing and developing talent in a transparent
and performance driven culture.

VALUES OF MCB

BankIslami is strongly committed towards its core values of:

Product authenticity
Customer focus
Meritocracy
Integrity
Team work
Humility
Innovation

THE FINANCIAL CONTROL DEPARTMENT

A financial control department makes sure that all financial transactions comply
with state laws, rules, and regulations. This Department is responsible for centrally
processing and recording the transactions. This department also ensures that enough
funds are available before the bank engages in a commitment. This department is also
responsible for generation the annual reports in compliance with the companys
ordinance 1984.
The Financial control department uses the Oracle GL as its information system
that our group has selected as a part of our assignment for the Management Information
System (MIS) course. Oracle GL is a product of the Oracle E-Business Suite which the
organization has acquired as its platform for managing its business transactions and
maintaining records. Oracle General Ledger works seamlessly with other Oracle EBusiness Suite products to drive better decision-making, sustainable financial discipline,
regulatory compliance, and optimized business processes.
These are what some elements of the Oracle General Ledger look like (sources:
http://www.virginia.edu/integratedsystem/howdoi/HTML/NAV3018U.htm )

THE PREVIOUS SYSTEM AND THE

COMPANYS NEED FOR A NEW SYSTEM
The Financial Control Department before switching over to Oracle E-Business Suites
Oracle GL system used an in-house developed system called Financial Control System.
This was implemented so as to meet the business needs of the company at that time,
however as the company expanded and its branches increased at a phenomenal rate and
it started to offer new services, the Financial Control System could no longer meet the
complex needs of the department. Apart from this, there were the usual system break
downs which resulted in increased cost (time cost because it required some time to repair
the system and monetary cost because it required having separate personnel for training
new employees).A need was felt that a new system had to be brought in to the department
that would integrate smoothly with the organization and the departments information
management needs and at the same time also be reliable. Therefore, after a period of
searching and evaluating various information systems, the company bought a new
information system, the Oracle Financial Suite and one of the elements of this financial
suite was Oracle GL which was perfectly suited for the Financial Control Departments
requirements. This system was adopted by the organization because it allowed the
company to cope with its changing requirements and this software gave the company
several options that were not previously available in the previous system. This system
also enables the organization to better organize its operations than before. The biggest
advantage of this system over the previous one was that it is compatible with other
elements of the Oracle Financial Suite, hence the work done in other departments can be
smoothly integrated with Financial Control Departments tasks and vice versa.

BENEFITS OF ORACLE GL TO THE

ORGANIZATION/DEPARTMENT/END USERS AND
ITS SALIENT FEATURES
The Oracle GL provides to its end users a friendly interface and hence the end user does
not require specialized training to operate this system (The end users can know how to
user this system with minimum of training.)This system enables the department to
generate accounting reports according the accounting standards of Pakistan and according
to the specific requirements of the bank. The system makes it easy to customize reports
the way they are needed which helps the bank and the department adjust to any
procedural or any other changes that may need to be implemented. For example if there
are any changes in accounting laws or procedures that the bank may need to implement,
the system easily facilitates that. This system also has the capability to fulfill most of the
requests of the end users by default. The Oracle GL provides high Data Integrity by
making sure that the data that is saved will be available for future use and will not have
any errors. Data retrieval or data recovery is also made easy by the system and the end
users of the system are saved from spending too much time or effort in trying to recover
data that may normally be hard to find in other systems. It also reduces the occurrence of
a system failure to almost ZERO (according to the person we interviewed) as there hardly
are any cases of system crashes or any other issues with the system. It also has a
Relational Database Management System that stores data in the form of related tables.
Relational databases are powerful database management systems because they require few
assumptions about how data is related or how it will be extracted from the database. As a
result, the same database can be viewed in many different ways. (Sources:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RDBMS.html).

INFORMATION PROVIDED BY THE SYSTEM

This system enables the department in making General Ledgers for the bank, completing
its transactions, maintaining accounts and balances of the bank and its customers and
with the help of that it helps the department to balance the accounts and generate
Financial Statements (the MCB generates the following financial statements with the help
of this system: Balance Sheet; Profit and Loss account; Cash Flow statement and
Statement of Changes in Equity). The system then saves and documents all these reports
and financial statements into its database for future use and referencing.
This information is not only useful for preparing reports and financial statements for the
bank but is also used in times such as making audit reports, company reports, etc.

END USERS OF THE SYSTEM AND THE

DEPARTMENT IT CATERS TO
Since Oracle GL is a financial software system designed to for an organizations financial
needs and caters to an organization like MCBs financial needs. Its end users will be
people related to finance. In this case, employees in MCBs Financial Control Division
are the end users of the system. All the employees in this department have been properly
trained to use this system. The system itself has also been highly customized to suit all
the needs of the department and meet its requirements in an efficient and cost effective
manner.

TRAINING OF THE END USERS

- The training involved people from Oracle visiting the organization which was the MCB
head office. These sessions were held at MCB only due to the fact that they could
accommodate space for the sessions, and hence theses sessions were not held outside the
organization as is usually the case with other organizations.

- The training sessions resembled much like the classroom format. Attendants were given
classroom like training lessons regarding the system. They were given books and CDs for
studying at home too.

- Since the system is meant for only the finance department, only people with financial and
accounting expertise could attend these sessions. They were, however, accompanied by
technical consultants, functional implementers, and Database Administrators (IT
personnel).

- While these sessions were going on, the attendants were not assigned with any work.
Coming to the organization, they would directly go to these sessions and not to work.

- In this course, attendants learned the basics regarding the table functionality of the core
Oracle General Ledger. This course also taught the Applications Basics and centered on
how to use the basic Applications tools to find information, as well as describe concurrent
processing, flex fields, alerts, and Oracle Workflow Builder. Attendants learned how to
read and understand Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), and Oracle Applications'
Applications Technology ERDs.

- This course will also address the standards for using these interfaces.

Basic technical functionality of the core Financials applications

Technical overview of Oracle General Ledger.
Customers, and Assets
Major business functions associated with the financial applications
Flow of application information through major tables

- The objectives of the sessions were the following

Describing the Oracle General Ledger

Identifying the primary business functions that can be performed using each
Oracle Financials application
Describing the Oracle Financials applications integration and data flow among
applications
Over viewing the default account sources, multi-organization architecture, and
the use of Multiple Reporting Currencies

- Lastly, the attendants were made familiar with the following:

Major business functions of Oracle General Ledger

Oracle General Ledger entity relationship diagrams related to its major
functions
Major tables by business function

- The attendants returned as soon as the training sessions ended, ready to carry out their
tasks with the new system.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS OF THE

INFORMATION SYSTEM
Hardware HP Blade Server
Software Oracle e-Business Suite R12
Operating System Linux Environment
Input Financial data
Output financial statements like ledgers, balance sheet etc.
Processing Batch processing
Storage both Hot-sites and Cold-sites (to be discussed later in the report)

SECURITY OF THE SYSTEM

Security covers

- User authenticity:
As mentioned earlier, the system is restricted for use by the financial personnel, therefore
only people from the Financial Control department. Also, since its use is only finance
specific, others departments have nothing to do with it.
Having said that, there are passwords for the end users; hence passwords ensure security
and control.

- Physical access:
Physical access is made limited by locked server rooms, sign-in sheets, etc.

- Function security:

Developers Register Functions

o Developers can require parts of their Oracle Forms code to look up a
unique function name, and then take some action based on whether the
function is available in the current responsibility.
o Developers register functions. They can also register parameters that pass
values to a function. For example, a form may support data entry only
when a function parameter is passed to it.
o Typically, developers define a menu including all the functions available
in an application (i.e., all the forms and their securable sub functions). For
some applications, developers may define additional menus that restrict
the application's functionality by omitting specific forms and sub
functions.
o When developers define menus of functions, they typically group the sub
functions of a form on a sub function menu they associate with the form.

System Administrators Exclude Functions

o Each Oracle Applications product is delivered with one or more
predefined menu hierarchies. System Administrators can assign a
predefined menu hierarchy to a responsibility. To tailor a responsibility,
System Administrators exclude functions or menus of functions from that
responsibility using exclusion rules.
o If a System Administrators cannot create the desired menu by applying
exclusion rules to a predefined menu, they can define a new menu
hierarchy. In this case, they construct their menu hierarchy using forms
and their associated menus of sub functions. In other words, System

Administrators should leave the developer-defined associations between

forms and their menus in tact.
Available Functions Depend on the Current Responsibility
o When a user first selects or changes their responsibility, a list of functions
obtained from the responsibility's menu structure is cached in memory.
o Functions a System Administrator has excluded from the current
responsibility are marked as unavailable.
o Form functions in the function hierarchy (i.e., menu hierarchy) are
displayed in the Navigate window. Available sub functions are accessed by
working with the application's forms.

Visibility of Excluded Functions

Some sub functions are associated with a graphical element, for example, a
button, and their exclusion may result in:
o the dimming of the button
o The absence of the button.

- Other sub functions may not correspond to a graphical element, and their exclusion
may not be obvious to an end user.

BACKUPS
- MCB has both cold sites and hot sites for its new financial system the Oracle
General Ledger.

- Since its not a multinational organization, it has its hot sites in Pakistan only.
- The cold sites are the various regional headquarters in the country.
- The hot site is the main headquarter in Karachi at the I.I. Chundrighar Road.
- Backups are scheduled on a daily bases in the off-peak hours (late nights).
- This time of the day has been selected due to the fact that during the day the systems
are overworked enough to be able to do in real time. Hence, batch processing suits
this organizations culture.

- The data stored would include the financial data converted into statements and
ledgers etc.

PROBLEMS WITH THE SYSTEM

In our interview with the banks employees who worked on the system, it seemed they
were very satisfied with the system and considered that the Oracle GL was a perfect fit
for their department. The IT department too was very satisfied with the Oracle software
and told us that the number of complaints that they previously used to receive from their
employees when they were using their in-house software was very high. Ever since the
introduction of Oracle GL, those complaints have almost entirely disappeared because of
which the efficiency of the departments has also risen. So for the end users of the
organization, the software had no flaws other than that some employees thought that the
software could be further customized in a better way to suit their business better.

RECOMMENDATIONS AND FUTURE

PLANS ABOUT THE IS
Although Oracle has provided MCB with a highly customized Information System to suit
its business needs, the Financial Control Division feels that Oracle GL has not been
customized enough to suit their needs according to their specific needs. Therefore one
recommendation that is notable and must be pointed out is that if the company purchases
a new version of Oracle GL, it should be further customized in a better way with the
specific needs of the Financial Control Division in mind.
System enhancements over time might also need to be carried out that could involve
upgrading the server, storage and database systems.
As for the future plans of the Company regarding the information system, it seems that
the company is satisfied with the system and willing to retain it. It will purchase new
versions of the Oracle E-Business Suite as soon as they are released.
In the future, MCB also has expansion plans and is expected to open branches and start
operations in some foreign countries also. When that happens, a great deal more will need
to be invested in the companys information system and it would remain to be seen
whether the company would continue using the current information system or switch to
some other information system.

CONCLUSION
The Oracle E-Business Suite is a top of the line application software used by businesses
around the world. Oracle is a software company renowned for providing its customers
with excellent softwares that provide fast, easy and efficient business information and
support systems which play a vital part in operational running of a business and coming
up with improved business solutions.
MCB aims to keep its business in line with the top banks and corporations of the country
and therefore, it has chosen Oracle E-Business Suite as the application software that
manages and supports its business applications. The Oracle GL has the important task of
maintaining General Ledger Balances of the bank from around the country and
generating reports and financial statements on a daily basis.