Techrity Consulting

Financial Industry Case Study

The client is a leading global private investment firm, whose family of funds include private and public equity, venture capital and leveraged debt assets. In order to compete effectively in the market, the customer's deal teams need to access, manage, and use information quickly and accurately. Speed and control are the keys to reducing product cycle time, accelerating response to customers and driving cost and inefficiency out of business processes.

The Problem

The firm's analysts are responsible for compiling and analyzing research on current and prospective investments, which is used to make critical financial decisions and provide the foundation for profitable deals. The task of compiling research and wading through mountains of information is both challenging and costly. Volumes of data come into the firm from various sources every day. Each analyst receives thousands of documents through email, web sites, and news feeds each day containing information on markets, industries and companies critical to their research.

All of this research data was being saved by hundreds of individual users to a shared drive. Each individual saved the data according to his or her own classification system (taxonomy). With no common structure, locating saved information was a difficult and inaccurate process. Nothing was being shared since no one knew where anything was saved, and there was much duplication on network drives. In order to cut costs, reduce risk, and improve research quality, the firm clearly needed a system for more efficiently storing and accessing the research data.

Techrity helped the firm address their challenges by implementing a streamlined deal document management system This system allows the client to easily review, classify, store, retrieve and share critical research data. The system is centered around a central repository for all research documents. The solution includes mechanisms for the automated and/or expedited storing, indexing, searching, and easy retrieval of documents. Using Interwoven's WorkSite MP, the client now effortlessly saves all research documents in a logically structured taxonomy.

Because the analysts have varying technical skillsets and many responsibilities, the system needed to work seamlessly and cooperatively with the other tools they use every day. Techrity integrated the system with their normal work tools, including MS Office, Outlook, Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat. For example, documents stored in the central repository appear in a virtual folder in Outlook. And email documents received in Outlook are automatically categorized and saved into the central repository. Techrity also added integration components to expedite the import of web pages and PDFs. From any web page, a user may right click, and follow the prompts to save the page and associated metadata into WorkSite MP. Designed for non-technical users, the system created new efficiencies almost immediately.

Techrity developed integrations to automate the import of research documents from their sources directly into the WorkSite MP repository. Metadata is automatically attached to the files, pulling keywords directly from the content of the email, and enabling quick and easy searches.

An Alert Feature, allows users to set up custom alarms based on particular keywords. When a research document containing a specified keyword is imported into WorkSite MP from any source, an alert is sent to the analyst.

Since the client had been operating for many years, it had significant amounts of existing data stored in their shared folder, on analysts' PCs, and in various other systems. Techrity worked with the client to automate the import of this Legacy documentation into their central repository, while automatically cataloging the documents and attaching the metadata to allow these documents to be easily indexed and retrieved when needed.