The Right Time for Rightsizing
Surveying the Landscape
The first step in determining the potential impact of rightsizing on your organization is to identify all of the applications and tasks that are required as part your day-to-day operations. For example, how many programs are you using to receive data from your trade order management vendors, and then process, analyze, account, report, and then format it so that it can be shared with custodians, partners, and customers? How many hours per day do portfolio managers and staff spend formatting, querying, and publishing the information?
Getting a truly accurate picture of how productivity can be affected also requires talking individually with portfolio managers and support staff about the tools they use for their decision-making and client interaction. Are they crunching numbers using their own Excel macros? Have they installed additional software on their PCs to create reports or graphs for specific clients? You'll also need to identify any task-specific staffers who could become more productive by broadening their responsibilities.
Gathering all of this information enables you to see the opportunities for reducing your total technology cost of ownership by implementing a single application that can be used to accomplish all of these tasks. In addition to the licensing, support and other fees from software vendors, every application that your company uses includes personnel costs for training, as well as placing a burden on IT, which is responsible for setup and ongoing maintenance. The latest integrated portfolio management applications can replace a myriad of programs including report writers, graphing, charting, reconciliation and analysis tools, and significantly reduce the cost of your software platform.
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