Time to generate performance reports reduced by 87%
Challenges
The company’s controller department supports the company’s front-office investment operations and top management by producing reports on investments and portfolios, and helping the company meet its regulatory requirements, including the particular requirements for the country’s pension operators. The company uses Wallstreet Suite as its strategic platform for investment management. The controller department team had always preferred to extract data manually from the system into their familiar spreadsheets and from there calculate the data and create reports.
“Having our well educated team spending much of their time copying and pasting was not a very productive use of resources,” says the company’s risk analyst. “As well as being a human resource and morale issue, we wanted to free up more time for our staff to analyze reports or create more sophisticated approaches to improve the business.”
Solution
Management and IT at the pension company became aware that many other users of the portfolio management system were greatly improving their reporting through the use of the OmniFi business intelligence, testing and reconciliation solution from SkySparc.
“After talking to a few of them we were immediately interested in finding out more and getting it implemented,” says the company’s risk analyst. “In the end it took just three months from making the decision to starting to see the real productivity benefits of the solution.
“OmniFi is very easy to use. It provides us with true transparency into the rich data available in our portfolio management system and the way it is structured. Thanks to the intuitive user interface and our team’s familiarity with the user interface layer – Excel – we self-learned quite a lot once we had the basics.”
The solution was simply implemented at the pension company without any major transformation program. But already the types of reports being delivered using the solution are expanding, and the insurance group now has plans to extend its business intelligence and reporting capability to incorporate data from multiple systems.
All combined, for these performance reports it was taking two people one day from start to finish… Now it takes two people under one hour – an 87% reduction in time.
The company’s risk analyst
Results
The length of time taken to manually compile reports before OmniFi depended on the type of report. But, by way of example, compiling the weekly returns report took one hour at best, often more. Reporting by asset class also took around one-to-two hours.
“All combined, for these performance reports it was taking two people one day from start to finish,” says the company’s risk analyst. “It was quite an intensive process. Now it takes two people under one hour – an 87% reduction in time.”
Already the company has seen huge benefits in performance reporting, which is where it had identified the most pressing need. “But one thing we didn’t expect was that by making reports more automated and reducing manual process, we’ve changed our way of thinking about reporting and our processes,” says the company’s risk analyst.
“Before, if we needed a new report we would start out doing it manually. Now we’ve seen an automated approach is possible we try to do everything in our work as automated as possible. Our culture has changed a lot after using OmniFi. We now try to be efficient in everything.”
OmniFi had also helped the pension company improve its business continuity and human resource management. With the speed of reporting and ease of use, the company was able to allow the staff usually responsible for reporting to both take summer vacation at the same time.
Because of OmniFi's easy-to-use and familiar Excel user interface layer and intuitive and transparent data sourcing, the company could quickly educate a summer trainee in its report generation processes. That trainee was able to meet the reporting requirements of the business while permanent staff members were away.
Over the next 12 months, The company says it expects to continue moving other report generation processes onto the OmniFi solution, moving beyond performance reports and creating new report types. The company has also investigated the powerful automated testing and reconciliation capabilities of OmniFi.
“We expect that in future upgrade projects this will greatly simplify our testing,” the company’s risk analyst.
