Web-Accessible Database Links Worldwide Trading Network
Snapshot
| Organization New Range Management, a financial services firm in London, England. |
| The Challenge Deliver account and trading information quickly to clients around the world. |
| The Strategy Move from a manual data-entry system to an Internet-based system offering secure and flexible data-input, tracking, and reporting. |
| The Results A 40 percent reduction in staff and $100,000 in savings while handling much larger volumes of information, eliminating data entry errors, and providing better service: Clients have immediate access to trade and accounting information, and the company can check its financial position in minutes rather than days. |
| Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, WebFOCUS Maintain, WebFOCUS ReportCaster, Consulting |
Corin Gunn, a veteran of the financial services industry, knew what he wanted: a powerful application that would help his company's clients keep track of their accounts. He wanted to eliminate a system that relied on entering the same data on paper forms multiple times, a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Because his business focuses on financial markets, the system had to be fast, accurate, and thorough. Gunn knew such systems could be found on trading floors and in brokerage houses. His problem was the unique nature of his clientele and the way they did business.
His clients aren't in one building. They aren't even on one continent. Stock traders for large institutional investors, his clients trade on many stock exchanges, in many currencies and time zones, and often work from home, not only in financial centers such as London and New York, but in places like Bermuda and Monaco. The cost of building a centralized database and a network that could reach anywhere in the world was prohibitive for Gunn's small business.
By using the Internet instead of a proprietary network, Gunn could extend his company's reach to every trader's home, at very low cost. And by using WebFOCUS from Information Builders, he could create a system accessible over the Internet, eliminate data reentry, and instantly deliver a rich variety of reports, at any time, to clients worldwide. As a bonus, Gunn can track the financial status of his company on a daily basis and deliver reports in minutes that previously took weeks to produce.
Although Information Builders' technology is most commonly used by larger companies, New Range Management's new Online Trading System illustrates that even small organizations can attain worldwide reach and realize substantial returns on investment by using Internet-based software effectively.
A Larger Vision
New Range Management acts on behalf of a worldwide network of stock traders who managed more than U.S. $5 billion in trades in 2000.
After a client executes a trade, information about it is sent to New Range Management, which forwards the data to a clearinghouse to ensure that the trader's account is debited or credited correctly. New Range Management also prepares monthly and annual profit and loss statements, calculates commissions, and generates reports for the traders and the institutions that they work for.
When Gunn, director of operations, joined the company in 1999, he was concerned about the amount of paper used and the number of times that data was reentered. The company had PCs, but no network. A dial-up modem was the company's connection to e-mail and the Internet.
Traders typically faxed blotters (forms used to record trading information) to New Range Management, which manually transferred the data to new blotters, and also entered the data in several different spreadsheets. Reports were printed out each day and faxed back to the traders. At the end of the month, the staff had to generate monthly reports, which required two or three additional days to prepare and input.
"We had too many people doing number crunching and duplicating work," says Gunn. Small measures – a local-area network and a server to store common files – would have reduced some of the duplication, but Gunn had a much larger vision. He wanted to take advantage of Information Builders' technology to streamline New Range Management's business processes and lay a foundation for future services.
Gunn knew that Information Builders' products could deliver exactly the result he wanted. He asked for more, however: Information Builders not only delivered the software, but configured the local-area network and server, and was given a contract to provide ongoing maintenance for the PCs and network.
But most of the basic maintenance of New Range Management's Online Trading System can be done by the company itself. Traders, stock exchanges, currencies, commission rates, and other elements can all be altered to accommodate changes in the business.
The system is also built to handle high volumes of business. Although it was rolled out at a time when trading was relatively light, Gunn anticipates no difficulty handling a much higher volume of trades or additional traders without having to modify the system.
Building New Business Advantages
Gunn's basic goal was to enter information only once and generate all the reports required from that entry. That's exactly what the new system achieved, and more: Gunn says he can now generate an instant snapshot of the state of the business or of any trader's accounts. He can also be alerted immediately to any unusual conditions.
WebFOCUS gave Gunn's customers a powerful solution for not only reading reports, but for ensuring the accuracy of transactions. They now access transaction screens with a Web browser and enter the data themselves, using WebFOCUS Maintain, Information Builders' product for updating records in databases. As a reporting solution, WebFOCUS gives traders and institutions instant access to balances and profit-and-loss statements. Another Information Builders' product, WebFOCUS ReportCaster, sends out reports and alerts instantly to anyone who needs them whenever preset conditions are met, such as a trader reaching a predetermined limit on losses or trades.
Gunn says the new system benefited enormously from a product like WebFOCUS that takes advantage of the Internet. Ten years ago, creating a client-server system and a network with a worldwide reach would have been unthinkable for such a small company. With WebFOCUS, New Range Management puts powerful information at the fingertips of its traders.
In the future, Gunn also hopes to ship information electronically to clearinghouses, so that transactions can be cleared automatically, without requiring further input.
No Going Back
Users initially balked at the new application, primarily because it looked so different from the screens they had seen previously. But now, says Gunn, "there's no way they'd go back to the previous system."
"The biggest benefit is this complete transparency. At any moment I can see exactly where the business is," Gunn says. Historical information, such as how the business has performed for the last six months, is instantly available as well. In the past, extracting such information took weeks.
Gunn estimates that the new system will pay for itself in two years, measured by tangible factors such as a 40 percent reduction in central support staff, the elimination of much of the paper and paper storage, and savings of more than $100,000 a year in communications costs.
But the intangibles may be even more significant. Financial losses due to keyboarding and transposition errors have been largely eliminated. Service has been significantly improved, at no cost to clients. Most importantly, in an industry where minutes make a huge difference, New Range Management's traders have information that is more accurate and more up-to-date than ever before.
"What's the value of improved business decisions that you make by getting your information faster? That's worth a great deal to these people," Gunn says.
"Knowing where they are affects the way they trade: If they're up, they have more flexibility in trading. If they're down, they can be more cautious. Before, this information could take two or three days to get to them.
