PowellJohnson, Inc. is a private asset management firm headquartered in Nashville, TN, with branch offices in New York City, Charlotte and Raleigh, NC, offering a full suite of investment, retirement and wealth planning services for their clients. PowellJohnson prides itself on utilizing a disciplined, objective process to determine the most appropriate investment solutions for its clients. The company demonstrated a similar common-sense approach in its selection of technology solutions as well: PowellJohnson chose Monarch Data Pump (MDP), to fulfill its data conversion and information delivery needs.

"We rely heavily on the daily reports provided to us by Fidelity Investments, which serves as our investment clearinghouse," says Greg Goodman, Reporting & Data Specialist for PowellJohnson. "Our operations teams, branch managers and representatives, and our compliance managers all need different views of this data on a daily basis, to effectively manage their portion of the overall business. MDP fulfills our enterprise data needs quickly and easily."

MONARCH DATA PUMP IS AN ENTERPRISE "UNIVERSAL DATA PLUG"

PowellJohnson receives 150 different brokerage reports from Fidelity each day, along with several 'transmission files,' which are text-based files containing raw data according to Goodman. "Virtually all of these reports are used to manage different aspects of our business. Many of the reports are exception reports containing data that is outside of the norm in some way, such as reports showing margin calls, house calls, short sells, etc. Other reports contain essentially 'all' data, such as our Daily Trade Blotter, containing all trades and transactions of the previous day."

"Before MDP, we had to print all our brokerage reports, split them apart by branch, and ship them overnight to each office. The cost of daily report printing and overnight shipping was significant. Plus, once managers received the reports, they could not easily work with the data in the reports. Many of the reports are hard to read and do not contain all necessary data within that one report, resulting in a substantial waste of man-hours to manually pick through and search for needed data.

"Now, thanks to MDP, we generally do not print our reports, but instead direct the report print files to MDP, which automatically mines and transforms the reports into multiple customized data views, depending on what department will be working with the data. We typically export the data views produced by MDP as Excel files and distribute them to operations and branch managers and representatives across the organization."

"People in different areas need different views of the data," Goodman adds. "For example, our investment advisers want to see data pertaining to their particular clients.

Branch managers in turn want to view data by all advisers in their branch. Operations and compliance managers are concerned with organization-wide data views. Drilling down even further, we organize our operations department into three primary groups – cash management, new accounts and account maintenance – each of which has a need for a different view of the data.

"MDP lets us create multiple custom data views, often originating from the same original report, to fulfill each person's unique informational needs. For example, thanks to MDP, branch managers easily review specific accounts and trades and take appropriate timely action, such as calling a customer to fill a call position, for example, before Fidelity sells out the account.

"MDP is our universal data plug, leveraging our existing reports and data sources, and connecting all of our managers with the specific data they need, all without programming."

MONARCH DATA PUMP COMBINES REPORTS, OTHER DATA SOURCES, FOR PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT

"Very often, we need to work with data within a certain report, plus additional data not appearing on the original report," Goodman says. "For example, some exception reports may contain the client's account number, but not the customer name and address, or other relevant data, such as the account balance. Such additional data exists within our transmission files or other external tables. MDP combines these data sources together automatically.

MDP's flexibility to combine different data sources together is important for compliance purposes as well as business operations. "NASD compliance is very important for all investment service providers," says Dene Shipp, Director of Operations for PowellJohnson. "MDP lets us perform automated reviews of our Daily Trade Blotter and other reports to help ensure NASD compliance.

"We supervise every trade that goes through PowellJohnson, but also manage by exception as well: certain trades, transactions or account activity that is outside of the norm. Using different data filtering, based on transaction type and account type, MDP enables us to identify and review such exception-based information in a proactive manner, to help us address small issues before they become problems."

MONARCH DATA PUMP OFFERS NEW FUNCTIONALITY

Monarch Data Pump offers additional capabilities to deliver even more value across the enterprise. The newest version of MDP, rebuilt based on the Microsoft .NET framework, delivers faster data processing, new data publishing capabilities, improved scheduling and logging of data processing jobs and more. Additionally, MDP utilizes the latest reportmining engine, Monarch Pro, for more report and data mining and exporting capabilities than ever before.

"We have been extremely pleased with Monarch Data Pump Version 6 and it'd be tough to manage now without it. We're excited about many of the new and improved features being delivered in MDP7, particularly automatic email capabilities and full utilization of Monarch Pro V7 features. MDP7 is much more than an upgrade – it's a quantum leap."

Asset Management Firm PowellJohnson Finds Monarch Data Pump a Strong Buy (PDF)

Goodman adds, "The only effective way we have found to empower our investment advisers, branch and operations managers and compliance with the custom data they need is to use MDP to transform and combine our daily library of brokerage reports and transmission files into live customized data. We at PowellJohnson recognize MDP as a mission-critical technology resource."