Statement Solutions, LLC.

Consulting - A large brokerage and investment services company, creating customized account statements & processing systems for its clients and brokers.		For team one it all started with three data sources. A proprietary internal back office system, an internal cost accounting system and an externally provided money fund system data feed. SSL gathered the data from the three sources into a single normalized database so that all the data required for output was in one place. As part of the normalization process, systems were setup to perform cross checking and balance verification. Once the data was validated it was sent to team two for formatting. While team one was working on normalizing the data team two was building the formatting engine that would take the data and format it as Adobe PDF files for web presentment and as post script files for streaming to the print house for paper output. Once the bulk of the format design was complete part of this team focused on the overall process automation for the client. The goal was to minimize the need for user input and intervention for the output of over 400,000 statements. After formatting the data as PDF and Postscript team two delivered the data to the output stream processing server. While teams one and two were busy creating and formatting the data, team three was building to the software to deliver over a million pages to the printer. The goal being to keep up with the output from team two while not overwhelming the capabilities of the print house to generate the needed documents during the SEC mandated five business day time frame. When team two completed step two they shifted their attention to automation of the entire process for future months. Setup of the automated processes on the mainframe and formatting servers was completed in time to use these processes during the first production run 5 months into the project. Upon success of the run, the team continued to refine the process until less then 6 hours of user intervention was required to run the whole process.Using the automated processes created in step 4, the normalized data from step 1 was formatted and prepped for output by the custom software developed in step two. The resultant formatted data was sent to the production processing streams defined and implemented in step 3. These streams in turn were sent to the print house where Statement Solutions performed complete oversight for the client.
A leading integrated financial services holding company with multiple subsidiaries which taken together provide a full range of wealth management, securities brokerage and investment banking services to individuals, family businesses, corporations and institutional investors. With over sixteen hundred Financial Advisors, it ranks as the seventh largest independent full service securities firm in the United States in terms of retail registered representatives. Overall these companies employ over 3,000 people across the United States.
Challenge Process Results Solution	In early 2003 A large holding company acquired these multiple subsidaries and their parent company. The combined company nearly doubled its account base and holdings in the process. In order to serve its customers moving forward, the company needed to merge the data from two different mainframe systems, verify its integrity and produce accurate and timely statements for all of its customers. With a go live date in 6 months, schedules were tight from the start, and missing the go live date was not an option. The system needed to support the generation, printing and eWarehousing of 400,000 monthly statements, 100,000 trade confirmations and be available for both employees and clients over the internet 7 days a week. Statement Solutions, LLC was brought in to handle the data integration, migration and output. With employees skilled in the areas of mainframe programming, custom application development and statement design and formatting an overall integration and output plan was created. Using today's technology Statement Solutions created the database conversion tables. These were augmented with rigorous error checking algorithms and only after a triple QA inspection were they used on the production systems. Once the data was combined, integrated and verified, it was formatted for output on paper statements and for viewing on the web through a custom application using a web browser. The system went live in 5 months. After a short transition period all the accounts were available online and the redesigned statements were having a positive effect on the client base. Customer service calls lessened and account holders had more information available to them. Statement Solutions assigned three teams to the project. Team one focused on data normalization and validation, team two on data formatting and process automation and team three on output stream definition and oversight management. All three teams worked concurrently, but we will follow the data through the steps it took below.