Thomson Financial is a US$2 billion provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community. One of its most popular products is Thomson Financial PORTIA, a powerful portfolio management system that automates trading, analysis, and operations for more than 300 asset managers in 40 countries—a system that is used to manage more than $15 trillion in assets. PORTIA is used daily by many Thomson Financial customers. But because it was written 20 years ago as a menu-driven system, tasks often required multiple steps and frequent human intervention.

"As the pace of financial markets has quickened, our customers don’t have the time or patience to click through multiple menus to accomplish routine tasks such as running a report," explains Christy Bremner, Global Managing Director of the PORTIA Business Unit at Thomson Financial. "We wanted to support the optimization of our customers’ workflows and let them customize the software to meet the needs of different users in their organizations," Bremner says. "Workflow needs vary from person to person and firm to firm, and customization is very important to our customers."

By giving customers the ability to automate the many steps of tasks they perform, run them as a workflow, and customize workflows for different roles, Thomson Financial would help customers be far more efficient, while it eliminated inaccuracies. "The more things that humans need to do, the more opportunity there is for error," Bremner says. "For example, if a person types an incorrect price for a trade, the trade won’t go through, and the customer is exposed to financial loss and the risk of a failed trade settlement."

Segall Bryant & Hamill, a Chicago investment management firm (www.sbhic.com), is one Thomson Financial customer that uses PORTIA extensively. "PORTIA is a powerful product, and we’ve used it since our company’s inception in 1994. But it’s a little intimidating when you first encounter it," explains Russ Martin, Senior Financial Systems Architect for Segall Bryant & Hamill. "It doesn’t follow the software standards that people are used to seeing today, such as toolbars and buttons."

It took several weeks for new Segall Bryant & Hamill employees to become fluent in using PORTIA. "I would have loved to have been able to give new employees a quick orientation on the software and then have them be fairly self-sufficient," Martin says. But, as the person at the firm tasked with deploying and supporting software solutions, Martin dealt with numerous support calls. Even experienced users had trouble with infrequently used tasks such as importing portfolio data for new clients.

"Our portfolio administrators had to sit down with a paper manual and navigate very involved procedures," Martin says. "It could take up to two hours to set up one new client. When we were looking at growing the business, this was a major obstacle."

Thomson Financial wanted to figure out how to keep the powerful functionality of its PORTIA software but simplify its use. "The objective was not to overhaul PORTIA, because it did its job well, but to create a new way to interact with it," Bremner says. Because Thomson Financial is a Microsoft partner, Bremner’s staff used Microsoft technologies to refresh the application. "When we saw the new workflow and presentation technologies built into Microsoft’s latest development environment, we realized how much faster we could do this job than even a year ago," Bremner says. "It would have taken us five times longer to do this job using other technologies."

In fact, it took just six months to create PORTIA Workspace, the new graphical, workflow-enabled interface to PORTIA. Using the new software, customers can easily automate the features and functions that they use on a regular basis. They can add buttons for tasks such as adding a transaction, adding a security, or switching to another application and can then use these buttons to move quickly through the old menu system. To create a workflow, users simply link buttons, and the software automates both the human and system steps, such as running a nightly transaction batch.

An investment firm can configure the workspace for particular categories of users, and individual users can further configure their desktops to their needs. The operations staff uses the new software to easily monitor system activities such as process and workflow performance.

"A diverse group of people uses this software in our organization—portfolio managers, portfolio administrators, and operations people," Martin explains. "They all have very different needs. Portfolio managers are monitoring the performance of clients’ portfolios. Administrators need to access information about specific clients and investment reports. And operations people are more concerned with running transaction reports for groups of users. It’s very useful for them to customize PORTIA Workspace to do their individual jobs better. Instead of navigating a series of menus, employees can create series of workflow buttons that apply directly to them, helping them get through their days far more efficiently."

Thomson Financial customers are now able to work more efficiently to keep pace with fast-moving financial markets, while staying more competitive by keeping costs down. They are also increasing data accuracy, a natural result of automating process-intensive financial workflows. Thomson Financial is using PORTIA Workspace to win more business in an efficiency-obsessed market.

"As we grow our business, we have to make our current staff as efficient as we can," Martin says. "We should only have to add staff because there’s more substantive work, not because there's more bureaucratic work. The previous two-hour process of setting up a new client should now take just 30 minutes or less. This is the kind of efficiency gain that will allow us to easily handle new growth."

Training and support needs will drop sharply with PORTIA Workspace. Martin estimates that users will be up and running within a week, versus the three to four weeks currently required. "Using the new software, our users should be able to automate many steps that used to require their involvement," Martin says. "They can focus on their jobs, customize their work environment, and the software handles the workflow. It should also simplify user support, so I can spend my time developing and improving processes."

Martin and his staff will also be able to reduce development time on new projects. "We write a lot of custom software, to create reports and other financial tools, which often needs to pull information from PORTIA," he says. "Now, our developers can take advantage of the automated workflows to simplify coding efforts."

In the investment business, inaccurate data can result in a failed trade, a dissatisfied customer, and a lot of expensive correction work. "With PORTIA being one of the central information systems of our company, the accuracy of its data has a tremendous impact on the business as a whole," Martin says. "A seemingly minor mistake has the potential to affect everyone from the portfolio managers to the operations staff and can lead to trading errors, incorrect portfolio returns, or even the need to regenerate client statements. With such high stakes, we do everything we can to ensure data accuracy. With this new software, we have a very effective tool in meeting these demands."

With existing customers such as Segall Bryant & Hamill eagerly embracing the new efficiencies that they are discovering with PORTIA Workspace, Thomson Financial is busy winning new customers with the software. "PORTIA Workspace is helping us win new business because of its innovative approach to optimizing the user’s experience with the system. People want to use PORTIA," Bremner says. "We’ve increased our pipeline of new leads and are more competitive. Nothing else on the market comes close to this product’s ability to customize workflows."

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