Operational Efficiency

Background

The key to the success of your Operations Department lies in error-free, cost-effective processing of trades from initial placement through to final settlement, confirmation and regulatory reporting.

There’s a lot to go wrong in the multi-stage process, which typically spans a variety of legacy systems, gateways, multiple instrument codes, multiple messaging protocols and the file types handled.

Meeting and exceeding your Service Level Agreements, with both internal and external customers, is a crucial metric of your operation.

The quality of your Operations Department depends on:

• you knowing that something has gone wrong - instantly
• you being able to resolve the problem before serious damage is done
• your documented performance against agreed criteria and metrics (KPIs and SLAs)

Issues

Improvements in the Operations area revolve around: 

• your team being able to pinpoint pressure points
• quick and accurate resolution
• timely status reporting to your customers
• systematic addressing of exception resolution with clear audit trails
• reducing errors and delays

Today’s transaction infrastructure is complex and heterogeneous. A single business transaction involves multiple system transactions, transcends the front, middle and back offices and is the changing responsibility of diverse groups and departments as it works its way through the business.

Each step in the process and each transition between those steps is a potential source of error and delay. At the highest level, you need an overview of all current transactions, consolidated to provide a summary of the general health of the system. Using a Dashboard type interface, you need to see the percentage (or number) of successful, delayed and failed transactions. Depending on your requirements, this view may be differentiated by transaction type, SLA classification or even by customer priority. Your staff need to have different views of the same transaction flow.

Resolving Inefficiencies

Once a problem transaction has been identified, you will need as much information as possible to ensure speedy resolution. The monitoring instance needs to understand the detail of each step, the expected inputs and outputs and the relevance of the steps and their sequence to the overall transaction. Drill-down functionality is required to view the detail of a processing failure and manual intervention must be supported and triggered automatically, where appropriate.

Speedy, effective resolution is key. Sometimes the underlying cause is of a technical nature – something is broken and needs fixing, fast. Another time, you are faced with mismatching or missing data. Maybe the issue is caused simply by the out-of-sequence processing of a sub-transaction. Whatever the cause, you need reliable identification of the problem and help in getting it fixed. That help might involve the creation of a workflow instance for manual intervention, correction of bad or missing data using agreed business rules.

And when the problem transactions have been identified, the underlying causes have been found and the steps have been taken to ensure the speedy and effective resolution that your customers have come to expect of you, you will probably want detailed Resolution Reports to demonstrate to your customers that – once again – you and your team have provided first class service in line with the agreed KPIs and SLAs.

The PaceMaker Solution

PaceMetrics offers products and professional services to address these business issues and to ensure that your Operations Department works to maximum efficiency and precision. In the case of Operations, it is likely that PaceMaker will provide the core solution.

PaceMaker is a non-intrusive, real-time monitoring system that provides end to end control and full transparency into every business transaction. A powerful Rules Engine defines the business logic to support different transaction types and to recognise the sub-components of each transaction as they are processed by multiple sub-systems. An easy-to-use Dashboard provides configurable views of processing status across the business from high level throughput to drill-down functionality to the detail of any transaction. Rules-based exception resolution can be applied to issues where it is appropriate and workflow instances can be automatically generated where manual intervention is required. The inherent escalation and reporting functionality of the underlying workflow infrastructure can even be integrated into the monitoring process itself.

Transaction processing statistics – and even the transaction detail itself – as well as resolution history, are captured for documentation and reporting purposes in the PaceMaker Operational Event Store (OES). This historical data provides ideal source data for Six Sigma process analysis, as well as providing insight into common faults and guidance on the better deployment of your resources.

Professional Services

Best of breed tools alone are not sufficient to guarantee the successful rollout of an end-to-end Operations solution. No two organisations are the same. The PaceMetrics Professional Services team ensures that the tools are implemented so as to reflect the nuances of your business and to ensure your competitive advantage. The PaceMetrics Professional Services team has a wealth of experience across all areas of the financial services industry and works to a structured but flexible implementation methodology to ensure effective rollout across your Business Processes.