Earlier, ICBC Zhejiang Branch's Liu Hong working at the Small Business Finance Service Center has been named the outstanding customer manager. Liu Hong with his excellent business skills and heartfelt services has successfully attracted nearly 40 small and micro enterprises, despite only one-year of working experience as a customer manager serving small enterprises. Liu Hong also helped several small and micro enterprises get over the difficulty of nearly going out of business due to liquidity problem. Liu Hong is happy to help customers at his work. Before that, Liu Hong was a report preparation staff in sub-branch, looking at mountains of data every day. For a while, the extraverted Liu Hong has been thinking to leave ICBC.

Mr. Liu's successful career change this time is a result of ICBC's reform in centralized report form management. Started in 2009, the reform has been accomplished recently according to the stated objective. The reform, lasting two-and-a-half years, has released 21,600 report preparation staff to work in new positions. When compared to the number of report preparation staff before the reform, 76% has been cut down. Through the reform, ICBC has cancelled and consolidated nearly 30,000 different types of report forms, a drop of 60% since the reform. Automation rate and generation efficiency of different types of report forms have been significantly improved.

An executive with ICBC said, report forms are important tool in a commercial bank's business management. Only through accurate, timely and complete report forms could the managers accurately master the business progress of the bank, and make scientific decisions based on the forms. In the past, a great number of report forms have to be prepared manually as a result of low integration in report management. The timeliness and quality of reports are greatly affected besides occupying large amount of manpower to prepare the reports. ICBC followed the approach of "One database in ICBC" to start the centralized report reform. The enterprise-level data warehouse is used to set up the ICBC Centralized Report Form Management Platform. Senior branches are responsible for the automatic generation of business reports, while the business segments, branches at different levels retrieve their necessary reports and data based on their authorization. In the end, one standard is applied to the business data in all branches, improvement is succeed in the informatization management in all branches. The final goal of the reform has been achieved in better allocation of human resources, improvement in business management and enhancement in customer service capacity.

First, the centralized report reform has significantly reduced the workload of manual report reparation. Many report preparation staff, like Liu Hong, have been released from tedious work of data gathering and report preparation. After training on new positions, they are transferred to work in the front office, customer services and marketing management in low-level business units. Other staff formerly involved in report preparation can now dedicated to their own jobs. Staff deployment and human resource allocation in low-level branches are significantly improved. All branches can concentrate to grow their businesses, enhance the quality of services to customers, expand into other markets and improve business management.

Moreover, the centralized report reform effectively raises the standard, specialization and automation of ICBC report forms, also boosting the level of ICBC's management informatization.

More important, the centralized report reform helps make ICBC decisions much more scientific and accurate, a major factor to step up ICBC business management. Before the reform, ICBC management staff at all levels have to give instructions to junior staff in different business segments to prepare ad-hoc reports manually in order to understand the latest progress of business and get the management data. The long cycle of getting data, bad timeliness, uneven data quality have affected making scientific, accurate and timely decision or judgments. After the reform, ICBC implements a working model of "one in, one out" for data and information passing through the report center. Data are automatically retrieved, automatically generated from the host and business systems. This has substantially improved the accuracy and timeliness of data, providing strong support for management staff to make better decisions.