Case Study: Financial Reports Migration Project

Client Overview
The client is the world’s leading provider of financial services to institutional investors. With $15.3 trillion in assets under custody and $1.9 trillion under management, the client operates in 26 countries and more than 100 geographic markets worldwide. Its broad and integrated range of services spans the entire investment spectrum, including research, investment management, trading services and investment servicing. In all of the markets that the client serves, it ranks among the top world wide service providers.

Business Drivers

• This project was part of client’s Enterprise Portal construction;
• The original Web-based Report Centre, which was implemented in Seagate Crystal, could not satisfy the needs of growing customers and business;
• The plan was to migrate the Report Centre to Actuate BI platform since Actuate can store report, cube and support clusters better in its proprietary database and can provide comprehensive, flexible and user friendly online reporting functionality to end users.

Project Challenges

To achieve this project, the Insigma development team faced the following difficulties:

• Scalability and availability pressure. Continuous expansion of its business and increasing number of customers require the report centre to be able to satisfy various demands of the clients and to keep pace with the growth of the business and customers.
• Quality pressure. As the ultimate deliverables of commitment to end users, the new portal site put extremely strict quality controls on its reporting functionality.
• Time-to-market pressure. To support the portal site’s rapid business growth, the architecture of the Report Centre should be flexible and can provide quick turnaround for incoming requests.

Solution/Methodology

The Insigma team used customized Rational Unified Process (RUP), and took customer’s specific standards/requirements into account.

• Technologies covered: Actuate BI technology, J2 EE technology, Adobe Flex.
• Outsourcing model:  The Insigma project team collaboratively worked with client’s developers and business analysis. A small portion of key team members worked onsite and were responsible for communication and technical support while the rest worked locally to achieve basic development and test tasks.
• Scale of work: More than 100 core accounting report templates and more than 600 custom report templates were converted from old Crystal platform to Actuate platform

Benefits

• A more Flexible and comprehensive Report Centre based on Actuate BI platform.
• Easier to reach feature based on Actuate SOA architecture.
• Improved reporting functionality stability, scalability, flexibility to support Enterprise Portal’s global customers.
• Quicker turnaround and improved time to market benchmark using RUP iterative development model.
• Highly automated development and testing process with strict quality control.

The Voice of the Customer

This project was accomplished successfully and won many major awards both in business and technology.

Professional Pensions Award

This client was honoured “Custodian of the Year” and “Currency Manager of the Year” by Professional Pensions magazine at its 2008 UK Pensions Awards for its innovative solutions tailored to meet changing market and customer needs, outstanding reporting and performance management techniques, and top-tier customer service.

Our client was also cited for service excellence, earning high marks for the depth and breadth of customer partnerships. Building upon customer demand for accuracy, timely and bespoke information, the client was also recognized for Enterprise Portal website, which Insigma has helped to deploy.

Customer Innovation Award

The client is honoured “Customer Innovation Award” in 2004 and 2005 by Actuate Corporation. It is presented to our client for building the most innovative reporting application based on Actuate BI technology.  Insigma has helped our client to deploy mission critical Enterprise Reporting Applications and is successfully leveraging them across the enterprise to enhance efficiency and productivity and to improve corporate performance.

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