About
The Genesis programme is a multi-year journey that transforms how DBS manages capacity, initiatives, and financial management to enable enterprise agility. The programme reduces toil and complexity, introduces a single source of truth, and elevates transparency and decision making across all levels, right up to the CEO. Genesis began in 2018 with GENE (pronounced ‘genie’) – a bespoke product built in-house that brings data and multiple systems together onto one single platform. The product is an industry first that, as of 2021, allows end-to-end budgeting, forecasting, review and fungibility for capacity and financials, making it easier for the organisation to adapt to changing conditions. All through the process, different personas are further enabled through enriched controls, reporting and data insights. Genesis is a key programme led by DBS’ Transformation Group, with steer from the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer, and Head of Strategy and Planning.
Innovation presentation
DBS’ vision is to ‘Make Banking Joyful’, and we do so through designing solutions and experiences for colleagues by making information easy to access, transparent, and real time. Genesis supports that vision through these ways:
1. Simplifying multiple layers of approvals by refreshing policies and processes, which enables teams to make their own product decisions.
2. Making costs predictable, so that teams can shift their focus from accounting for cost to value-generating work.
3. Doing away with confusing, multiple documents and standalone systems, and moving towards having a single source of truth, and one way of working with access to transparent and real-time data.
To better support colleagues who are managing or leading teams, it was essential to remove toil – in the form of complicated information, complex approval processes and work accounting. Additionally, advancing enterprise agility proved difficult when tracking and reporting key information meant manual consolidation of multiple documents across separate systems and was retrospective in nature.
The solution was GENE, which was created to provide a one-stop view of workforce and financials management. GENE replaces the need for multiple spreadsheets, and compiles and tracks financial reports, cutting away hours of employee frustration. Armed with real-time portfolio details across geographies, work capacity, and the latest financials, our teams can be nimbler and more forward-looking, making proactive business decisions instead of reacting to aging data.
Uniqueness of the project
GENE provides a single view for capacity, work, and financials. It allows for adaptive resource planning with:
• >10,000 employee details with capacity details and approved headcount
• Transparency on initiative budgets, forecasts and spends, and cross-team work demands
• Real-time prioritisation and initiative dashboards, giving stakeholders the latest status of their submissions and an end-to-end view of work from ideas to delivery.
• Implementation of blended rates to determine costs, predictability, while facilitating auto-recharge.
This is further supported by our technology stack.
Event-driven microservices architecture – GENE uses domain driven development where each microservice is responsible for its specific domain. Kafka, a durable message broker that enables applications to process, persist, and re-process data, is used as a messaging middleware. We embedded Tableau for data visualisation, and Neo4J for data lineage management. To improve user experience and GENE’s performance, Redis cache management was introduced, leveraging solutions such as Redis
