Peer-to-Peer

BI helps brokerage firm up its operations

Asit C Mehta Investment Intermediates Ltd deployed MAIA 1Key to ease the load on its IT department. By Varun Aggarwal

Asit C Mehta Investment Intermediates Ltd, a stock broking firm has over 300 branches apart from franchisees. An enormous number of query requests are generated each day from a large number of business users within the company. In the past, every little query had to be manually generated by the IT team once a request came in from the user. Although requests would often be similar, separate queries needed to be generated in each instance. As most of the data was lying in different file formats, digging out information was difficult.

Prasad Bapat, CIO, Asit C Mehta, Investment Intermediates Ltd says, “A lot of data is accumulated at the data centre and we have to use this data in an intelligent manner to arrive at a business decision which will help to take the organisation forward. There were a large number of individual databases and MIS and reports that were required. The IT department was receiving a large number of query requests and requests for formatting etc. We realised that a lot of reporting requirement was coming from different departments and different users including the top management and the down the line users. This requirement came with different formats and different parameters.”

This task had become a burden on the software and IT department of the company. The company was looking for some business intelligence solution using data warehousing concepts. The solution had to be user friendly as the users were business users and might resisted a complex application. So the required solution had to enable and empower users to generate those reports and use them more efficiently to meet their frequently changing requirements to make use of the same data in different ways. The company decided to go for MAIA intelligence’s 1Key solution and the deployment began in January 2007. It is currently in its final phase of completion.

The evaluation phase

A lot of time and effort was going into the relatively simple job of reporting, data collection and correction. The company was exploring some tools for MIS reporting and came to know about this solution. “We did some evaluation on a preliminary basis with a few reports, which were quite acceptable even by the end users for their first hand confirmation. When we realised that that the users were comfortable with the solution, and we finally decided to go with 1Key.”

After evaluating MAIA’s 1key solution, the company decided to deploy it in a phased manner. As a proof of concept, the company applied some sample databases to generate simple queries. Bapat adds, “After the successful completion of this phase they moved to a more difficult and a larger database wherein about one crore of records were there and then when we were finally satisfied with the kind of results that were achieved, we were ready to use the solution in our organisation. We thought that it would be a good idea to standardise this as a tool for all our business requirements. So based on that we awarded them a contract and they had a partner with them who would be doing the actual implementation. So it was a good tie up between a good product company and an equally responsible implementer who would take it forward and make it successful.”

Bapat says that the solution has been deployed in four departments. In the first phase they converted existing reports into 1key. Today when a request comes in, users can be told that they can satisfy the request themselves using this new solution.

Bridging communication gaps

Unlike most of the software deployments, the company did not face much of a challenge in the deployment of the 1key solution. Though a lot of fine tuning was required based on the user’s feedback, there weren’t any major issues related to performance.

Bapat says, “Initially there was some communication gap at the implementation level, wherein the users wanted something and they were given something else. The existing reports were given in the same format and fine tuning the report and the flexible features were not explored by the user. We have a complain register used by the technology department. So now we are looking forward to use those reports to analyse things like the number of complaints, the average time to solve a particular complaint, how many complaints have taken more than the stipulated time to resolve. We were previously doing this in Excel and now this will be available in 1key. The report is there but we are not currently using it as we are still in the final stage of implementation.”

Bapat feels that user training is an important aspect for any kind of software deployment. As the end users in the company are all business users, so they are not entirely comfortable with IT tools. So it will take some before they get the feel of the ‘cool’ features and appreciate that all their requirements are readily available and solvable.

Benefits achieved

“Prior to the MAIA 1key implementation we were firing the queries manually using query analyser and then pasting it into Excel, then formatting it and presenting it to the management. That was a very tedious task and was very time consuming. Plus, whenever the management asked for new format, we had to redesign all the queries and formatting has to be redone. In 1key all these tasks can be done in a single shot, using the cube feature of 1key. This was a very good feature that I found,” says Bapat.

Bilal the MIS software manager at Asit C Mehta Investment Intermediates Ltd opines, “Previously we had to maintain the reports on some spare hard disks. Now we can assign a user’s security features in the system, with which a particular user can see only limited reports and thus we can implement the security part as well. With 1key, the same report can be taken to XML or any other source, like it is now possible to view the reports even at home. The implementation part was done by 1key’s partner. We had given them 30 sample reports. Most of them have been completely implemented. The users are finding them satisfactory as it easy to use with drag and drop features. With Excel users were finding it difficult to do it using cut and paste. 1key has simplified this task.”

The next step

The company had currently deployed the solution in four different departments. Bapat says that so far the response from the end user has been good. “We are trying to figure out how many users are actually using the application for the best of their use. It still might take a little time before all users get comfortable with the software,” he says. The company is planning to deploy 1key as an organisation wide tool and the entire deployment across all departments shall be completed in a short period of time.

The new features that would be added to the currently deployed application would be that of charts etc which would also be done soon. Bapat concludes, “We have taken a conscious decision to deploy this tool organisation-wide. Only the first stage is completed. So we have not used to its full potential. We are able to convert the existing reports and with some amount of rework and with user feedback. One thing which I really like is the drill down feature, and there are some calculation features that are available. The chart feature will be deployed within a few days.”