FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY / CASE #2

Name Withheld by Request

Background
Two large investment management companies merge. Each has a different data application for their contracts managing vendor related services to clients. The merged company needed a consolidated data base to collect and manage this data. They needed the application to be developed and fully operational very quickly.

Data Management Issues   
One of the merged companies had three hundred contracts managing vendor related services to clients in its Excel data base; the other had 3700 contracts in Access and FM data bases. Neither company’s contract management application provided executives with the depth of reporting needed for intelligent decision making.  In-house developers were not available to build this application because larger projects generated by the merger consumed their attention.

Solutions
1) Developed a dynamic, FileMaker metadata application for one of the smaller of the two companies with an eight tab, permission level interface driven by the privilege of the user (24 different permutations)

2) Added new, managerial level to statistical reporting which had not previously existed in either of the company’s applications

3) Cloned the metadata application to build a staging platform for in-take of the merged company’s data

4) Merged data into one unified FM application with the uniform fields, rules and structure

Benefits
1) New decision-making tool enabled managers to make more informed decisions resulting in fewer lost and dropped contracts, and more satisfied clients

2) Seamless integration of application into operating system

3) Timely completion of work contributed to normalization of merged companies

4) Significant cost savings over in-house development using enterprise level tools