A major IT overhaul has helped global investment firm
Schroders cope with the market volatility surrounding the credit
crunch.
The company, which manages £114bn of client assets, faced severe
pressure when the stock markets fluctuated wildly. But its
introduction of a new IT system, just before the downturn, meant it
could cope.
The company completed a two and a half year project to replace
the 27-year-old legacy system at the heart of its IT infrastructure
in September this year. The IMS Portfolio Accounting System (PAS)
had been developed in-house to manage Schroder's clients'
assets.
Matthew Oakeley, head of group IT at Schroders, says,"The PAS
was supported in-house very successfully, but the hardware was
going end-of-life and the system was really starting to show its
age. With the announcement that support for the hardware would be
withdrawn, we realised we needed to replace it,"
Schroders replaced the PAS system, which ran on
Hewlett-Packard-3000 hardware, with packaged software called
Dimension from supplier Simcorp. Dimension runs Oracle databases
housed on clustered Unix boxes.Schroders uses clustered Wintel
servers to run other components.
It was a massive undertaking to replace the PAS because the
system linked to 950 others, says Oakeley. "Something that has been
around for that long has interfaces and reports everywhere," he
said.
Perfect timing
The timing of the project could not have been better.
"The whole project, which was signed off in early 2006, was
completed by September 2008 and the markets went haywire in
October," says Oakeley.
The previous system would have struggled to report on the high
volume of requests processed during the height of the market
volatility of October.
He says the sheer volume of transactions put the system under
enormous pressure. In a normal month the firm will produce reports
on the performance of clients' investments three times a month, but
because of the volatility this was done 16 times during
October.
"The system took a real hammering because whenever the market is
volatile we extract information. The reporting burden in October
was much higher than usual because of the volatility and with the
previous systems it would have been hard to cope."
Oakeley says if the company had not signed off its biggest ever
project when the financial services was more bullish in early 2006
it may not have happened. "There is no way anyone would do a
project like this during the current market conditions."
Schroders re-engineered business processes and made major
changes to applications that linked to PAS. As a result Schroders
was able to consolidate 4500 separate reports to 200. Many reports
that Schroders sent out were no longer necessary.
The project was completed to time and to budget without the
business noticing any change, according to Oakeley.
This he puts down to focussed project management and Shroder's
testing strategy. "We focussed the project on what was needed to
get us to where we wanted to be rather than have a wish list. We
also drove a large part of the project from our testing strategy to
ensure we knew what needed to be tested and when."
The Shroders' project, the Book of Record IT project, won the
top prize at the Corporate IT Forum's Real IT Awards 2008. Though
Shroders had not planned its project to meet the market turmoil of
October, the unprecedented transaction volumes of this period
certainly demonstrated the efficacy and necessity of the
system.
Project stages
Schroders migrated to the news system in 3 stages. Following two
years of testing and planning, the first migration was done in
February 2008, the second in May, with the final transfer completed
at the end of August.
Resources
The project took the equivalent of 38,000 man days to complete.
It used 200 staff at its peak, compared to the firm's normal IT
project team of between four and eight people.
Schroders by numbers
Manages £114bn in assets
3000 staff (1500 in London)
250 IT staff (150 in London)