Company Background
This financial organization is the world’s largest mutual financial institution, the UK’s third largest mortgage lender, and one of the largest savings providers in the United Kingdom.
Objectives
The company’s outdated analytics environment had gradually become inefficient. Analytics processing times were rising, and contention issues began to appear with increased regularity.
Resolutions
We consulted with upper management to gain a thorough understanding of their challenges and objectives. After assessing their current environment, we designed a new system architecture with an upgraded server. All analytics applications were migrated from Windows to a SAS Grid on the new IBM Power server solution. Analytics jobs now run in a fraction of the original time with no contention issues.
Benefits
The new upgraded environment provided a dramatic reduction in processing time, resulting in considerable cost savings, and more time for this organization to perform their data analysis.
Company Background
This company is a large financial services institution that manages and sells a broad range of domestic and international mutual funds. They have many analysts and statisticians working with large amounts of data.
Objectives
Legislation governing the mutual fund industry in South Africa requires a standard set of reports to be produced on a monthly basis (statutory reports). Additional financial reports for decision-making purposes (IT reports) are also mandatory.
The system used by the company’s finance department was manual and unwieldy, and an entire team was needed to obtain and manipulate the data into these required monthly reports. Some of their steps included the following:
- Each month, data was sourced from both the company’s general ledger system and corporate intranet.
- The results were then used to create statutory reports, which comprised of the income statement, balance sheet and related notes.
- Information needed for the IT reports, for example, the profitability of a mutual fund by client by sales channel, was extracted from the main operational system hosted on the mainframe.
Resolutions
The company chose financial management software to produce both the statutory and IT reports. Our South African office was selected to do the design and implementation.
This project raised a number of challenges before completion, the most significant being the data integrity issues that were uncovered. However, after being resolved through a series of process changes, the project was completed.
Benefits
The Financial software provides the information needed to streamline operations. Statutory reports are produced in minutes rather than weeks. The client experienced a dramatic decrease in cost, with additional time to spend on daily issues.
Company Background
This short-term insurance company is a leader in its field in South Africa and Botswana, selling insurance products to clients across each country.
Objectives
Financial reporting across multiple currencies (RSA Rand and the Botswana Pula) was a manual and time-consuming process that did not meet service level agreements. The company envisioned a tool that would allow local offices to view financial reports in their own currency with the parent company able to view consolidated figures in multiple currencies. Data visualization capabilities such as drill-down and other OLAP features were also needed.
Resolutions
Working with the organization, we outlined several options and reviewed the pros and cons of each. After careful review, they decided on financial management software. Its ability to integrate multiple currencies was perfect for their needs. They would also be able to consolidate numerous financial reports and share the results with their other offices.
Benefits
Destiny Corporation designed and implemented a solution that provided this firm with timely access to key business performance criteria. This led to tremendous cost savings and has enhanced business decision-making capabilities for this client.
Company Background
This organization has served as a not-for-profit agency for over fifty years and today leads the health care financing industry.
Objectives
Creating monthly reports and graphs about plan utilization was one of this firm’s many responsibilities. Six analysts dedicated several days a month towards this effort, using a combination of software in both mainframe and Windows environments. Several manual processes existed and as such, were prone to error, including the transfer of data between these various software packages.
Resolutions
We built a software application in a client server environment between their Windows servers and z/OS that could automatically determine reporting periods. The system extracted data from a DB2 data warehouse, then cleansed, analyzed and summarized it in one continuous process. A virtual click of a button published the report, eliminating the need for IT or coding experience.
Benefits
Previously, these reports and graphs were printed and distributed to various physicians and providers participating in our client’s plans. The new application automated this process by publishing the information on their corporate Intranet, making the information accessible in real time. The reports could also be printed in a web-based environment using HTML and PDF formats.
