Company Profile
Northern Trust (Nasdaq:NTRS) has been a global leader and a household name in delivering financial services for more than 124 years, to the world’s wealthiest individuals and enterprises.
Customer Need
Portfolio managers needed several key reports to be delivered daily in specific file formats to multiple locations.
Reports are the pivotal criteria used in the decision making process each morning before the stock market opens; the information in these reports forms the basis for investing and trading. Our client’s trading team manually ran and prepared nearly ten reports for dozens of accounts daily. The time lost due to this exercise robbed each trader of the time needed to make decisions on their portfolio. Furthermore, the human touch aspect increased the likelihood of errors in the reports.
Project Scope Summary
Deliver an automated, secure, configurable system that saves time and leaves no margin for error.
Solution Execution
Good solutions stem from using elements that already exist in the customer’s environment and augmenting them with change that can be accommodated. Our client possessed the needed licensing (SAP Business Objects Enterprise, versions XI R2 and R4), and had the system installed and running. Trading reports were successfully developed for Business Objects.
The key challenge was automation. Automating the timing and delivery of these reports based on different account configurations was the main objective of this project.
Globonix successfully developed a dynamic web application that would deliver reports to the right people at the right time, based on the daily input of the portfolio manager. Each morning the program will run different reports selected for a different type of account such as domestic, international, and intraday based on a different list of accounts generated from the database. Each report runs for a configurable number of accounts selected for the day and automatically exports ‘pdf’ versions to the appropriate network drive.
Lastly, a function to merge all common reports into a package was put in place for each portfolio manager based on their configurable criteria. After this was completed, when traders arrived into the office, the reports were ready their use.
Results!
Today, the time saved manually preparing reports is now spent on making valuable decisions.
Application usage grew from reporting on 20 to 30 accounts among 6 managers to 250 accounts spread among 30 managers – that’s an increased band-width of 3 additional reports per manager and adoption keeps on growing!
Our client credits over 30 minutes a day in time savings across 30 mangers – that’s a 15 hour a day productivity gain.