FreeSight Automates Monthly Reporting for Investment Planning Counsel

The Situation

Every month a series of advisor performance reports is created and published for distribution to the company at large. As in any financial institution, there is no acceptable room for reporting errors in the calculation of any balances, allocations or results.

Challenges

Inputs include over 70 data files from different sources and in varied formats. These files include monthly sales transaction data from different business units, historical reference files, and complicated multi-level rules for allocations and transaction processing. The output must fit into an existing report template, and there must be a built in ability to perform appropriate and auditable quality control before the reports are published for distribution.

The Solution

FreeSight imports all of the monthly data into a model; more specifically, into an automated and transparent data processing workflow that includes all of the rules for data clean-up, processing, allocations, calculations and output reporting. Each month, instead of manually importing, joining, cleaning, and exporting data into reports, an automated process enables the computer to do all of the data work, allowing the data analyst more time to analyze results.

Results

A complicated manual error-prone process that used to take a number-crunching data analyst 3 or 4 person-days has now become a “push-button” process that is completed in approximately 1 hour of elapsed time (most of which is time that the computer is processing on its own). The same reports are created as before, except now they are completed automatically and more accurately.

Additionally, FreeSight supplies a framework that now enables IPC to quickly, easily create new reports and ad-hoc analyses on both current and historical data.

Davies Uses FreeSight For Database Queries, Analysis and Reporting

The Situation

Corporate Governance is one of law firm Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP’s areas of specialty. Among the services provided to clients are valuable insights in the areas of Board of Directors management and business decision processes. Davies looks at individual companies and compares them to other companies within their industry vertical, market cap, or other criteria as may be defined on an ad hoc basis.

Challenges

The data that is being compared and analyzed within the published reports includes hundreds of variables across many hundreds of different companies. Every report is customized – requiring a process that involves querying the database across specifically selected data points and then comparing these variables against as few or as many companies as desired.

Once satisfied with the query and findings one must then create all of the appropriate charts and graphs. The final report, which may be as comprehensive as a fifty page analysis, is then published. As one might imagine, completing such a task could take a huge amount of time and involve many individuals.

The Solution

A FreeSight model and query engine was developed that streamlines and automates the entire process. Any authorized FreeSight user can simply select the company(ies) to be analyzed, and then select the types of analyses to be completed with a simple “point” and “click”. Not only are all of the data tables and charts or graphs automatically generated, they are also automatically formatted and published into the output report.

Results

What had been an onerous manual query and analysis project that would have taken multiple staff members numerous days, if not weeks, to accomplish, has been turned into a five minute “point and click” procedure. Where previously huge effort was spent in the iterative data analysis, chart creation and report formatting, now time can be spent looking at and understanding what the data is showing.

TELUS Use of FreeSight For Data Integration, Data Analysis and Reporting

The Situation

Every week TELUS receives reports from third-party vendors depicting sales results for different regions across the country. These results are then merged with internal data to create one table, and cleaned to ensure that the data is consistent. Finally, analyses and reports are created and distributed to the business units.

Challenges

Manually accessing, merging and cleaning multiple sets of data can be a very time consuming and tedious task which can also result in numerous unintentional errors. Then, by the time one completes hours of merging and cleaning, there is scarcely time to truly analyze the data for trends or other important information.

The Solution

A FreeSight model was created that allows easy and seamless aggregation and cleaning. The third-party and internal files are simply dragged and dropped into the model where FreeSight automatically joins them. Cleaning and data normalization are then performed automatically and instantaneously in sequential stages as the data flows through the FreeSight model. Then the data automatically flows into pre-created analysis tables which allow the business to measure the success of various campaigns.

Results

Using FreeSight, a tedious manual and error-prone procedure that could take hours was turned into an automated procedure that takes minutes to execute. No data errors, no delays in completing reports, and more time to analyze and understand the results.