Productivity and precision in investment reporting

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A global financial organization improves the quality and quantity of its research output using Mèthode’s structured authoring approach

Background

A global ratings agency provides financial reporting and analysis to investors and other stakeholders.

The organization’s output amounts to over 4000 reports each month, created by around 1700 analysts and coordinators working out of 25 offices located in 19 different countries.

Reports are distributed in digital formats via the organization’s websites and mobile apps, as well as in PDF format for printing , mailing and download.

The Challenge

… key features to cut production times and improve the quality and compliance of the output.

The earlier system used to produce the reports, based on standard office apps and coordinated through email, was unable to deliver the productivity and quality required in a multiformat publishing operation.

What was needed was a content-management solution that would:

  • Publish in a variety of digital formats without manual intervention.
  • Streamline the exchange of material between authors and reviewers
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory standards

At the same time the system should be capable of generating statistics about the the organization’s output to allow management to make effective decisions about organizational structure and the allocation of resources.

The Solution

The Méthode solution has a number of key features to cut production times and improve the quality and compliance of the output:

Permissions and checkpoints ensure that reports comply with all quality and regulatory conditions and may not be published until they are satisfied.

Reports are automatically formatted and published without manual ‘repurposing’ to a range of destinations from print to mobile apps.

Reports are made up of components, allowing parallel working by multiple users on different parts of the report at the same time.

Automatic notification of users each time an item requires their attention, eliminates ‘dead time’ and aids collaboration.

Every time a report or asset is saved, an ‘audit log’ is updated, clearly documenting the changes that have been made to the object and the users responsible.

Charts and tables created in Excel™ are seamlessly integrated into documents and pages with simple drag and drop actions from inside the editing workspace.

Outcomes

 Increased productivity: parallel working on modular documents and the notification mechanism have all lead to an increase in the organization’s overall productivity. The modular approach also allows a ‘write once, use several times’ approach to eliminating duplication of effort.

 Increased visibility: versioning and audit logging give supervisory staff a detailed view of the users and operations involved in developing each report.

Improved compliance: built-in reviews and checkpoints, the use of constantly updated legal text ensure that materials are published in compliance with regulatory and professional standards.

 Better planning: the availability of detailed statistics on every aspect of production gives management a powerful tool for optimising the use of resources and adapting the organizational structure to changing trends.

For more details of this project, read the Full Report and discover financial reporting software examples

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