Companies which rely on information for their performance often face the challenge of data overload. For South African private client business BoE Private Clients, this issue came to a head as a result of its strong growth which rendered a previously reliable bespoke solution cumbersome and unreliable. The answer to its data processing requirements lay in IBM’s Cognos 8

, which was deployed by two-time Cognos Partner of the Year Synergy Business Intelligence.

BoE Private Clients manages the wealth of high net-worth individuals. The organisation offers a fully integrated spectrum of services, including investment management, financial and retirement planning, private lending facilities, call, notice and fixed term deposits and tax and estate planning.

In such an environment, reporting on the performance of client portfolios is a demanding task - and one which Steven Goodrich, Information Systems Manager, says is critical to the successful operation of the business. "The product of the Cognos 8 query and reporting tools is absolutely paramount to BoE Private Clients - what the system generates is very much the face of the business and it is absolutely core to our operations," he says.

Prior to the implementation of Cognos 8, Goodrich says the organisation was using a custom developed solution. While this solution started out as a sound option, with organic growth as well as mergers and acquisitions, the company found itself in a position where the tool had suffered from 'application creep'.

Goodrich explains: "Our previous reporting solution had become a monster. It would take eight hours to stage the required data at the end of each day, and then we would need a further 12 hours to generate the necessary reports. With the increased growth in customer numbers experienced at the beginning of this year, the old system simply became impractical."

On examining alternatives, Goodrich says Cognos 8 emerged as the leading contender for BoE Private Clients. More importantly, he says, having worked with Synergy Business Intelligence in the past, BoE Private Clients  had full confidence in the solution provider's ability to understand its needs and deploy the software appropriately.

Christo Bredenkamp, managing director of Synergy BI, says Cognos 8 offers advantages that contribute to the rapid creation of reports. "Cognos 8 delivers a complete BI suite which includes capabilities for the creation of professional reports, ad hoc reporting and monitoring, analysis and reporting against key performance indicators,” he says.

“It also delivers federated queries, with a single query drawing on multi-vendor data sources, even within a single reporting object. That makes it faster than competing products," he says.

BoE Private Clients Senior Systems Developer Isolet Jansen notes the training provide by Synergy BI as part of the solution has also enabled the developer team to rapidly create the necessary reports. "After a matter of a few days of training, we have been able to do work that previously would have required years of experience; this has significantly improved the productivity of our developers," she says.

Using Cognos 8, Goodrich says the statements that the company issues to its clients at month end are now created rapidly and offer a deeper level of detail than was previously possible. "There are about 4500 reports that go out - it may not sound like a lot, but these are detailed statements that track the performance of our client's investments. In this market, it is also important that the reports are presented in a professional manner, which has been achieved using the Cognos software."

Since deploying Cognos 8, Goodrich says the generation of reports for distribution to its clients takes just three hours on the same hardware platform. It also allows the company to deliver the reports to clients via email or hardcopy, while ad-hoc reporting is now also a reality. "As a Web-based, thin client solution, we can also draw reports from anywhere in the country using the same data and system, giving us a single version of the truth," he says.

Owing to the initial successes using the Cognos 8 reporting tools, Goodrich says BoE Private Clients is exploring further possibilities offered by business intelligence. "We haven't even begun to explore the BI side, but that is definitely on the cards. The financial director is very interested in the potential offered by Cognos BI, and it is very likely that we will be using Cognos 8 as a primary management reporting tool owing to its proven functionality," he concludes.