12 November 2009

Suffolk Life is one of the largest companies in the world providing self-invested personal pensions. To date, it has established over 14,000 pension plan accounts, managing gross assets of over £3 billion.

Ongoing improvement at every level is a cornerstone of Suffolk Life’s business plan. Recently, Jet Reports has helped promote that goal by providing pension administrators the tools to access and act on vital data – data that in the past was only available to IT staff and the highest levels of executive management through outsourced specialised developers, at significant expense.

According to Neil Clayton, Suffolk Life’s solutions architect: “Using Jet Reports has allowed vital information to be accessible to a new level of management. Now our pension administrators have control over data that was difficult to make available to them before. Being able to see and understand that information gives them flexibility and helps in virtually every aspect of their job, including planning, performance assessment, and decision-making. They can build and see their KPIs themselves.”

Whether it’s tracking changes in legislation, optimising business growth through new clients, or developing new products and services, Jet Reports facilitates the data accessibility that fosters Suffolk Life’s goal of continual improvement. Jet Reports also helps Suffolk Life spur efficiency with a diverse array of investment choices, Suffolk Life has an ongoing, critical need for data reconciliation.

“By using Jet Reports out of Microsoft Dynamics NAV we’re able to do an extraction and reconciliation process in a minute or two, sometimes as little as ten seconds,” Clayton says. “One of our key business systems is preparing what we call corporate action reports. Corporate actions are events that happen on stocks and shares – dividend payouts, share splits and such. It’s imperative that throughout all of our transaction reporting, the numbers and event history match up when we send out a client’s annual statement.”

However, Suffolk Life found such balancing to be both complex and time-consuming. For the type of reconciliation needed in corporate action reports, manual checking was the norm – requiring up to 12 hours per plan.
“We’re able to use the Jet Reports extraction from Dynamics NAV, plus the downloaded corporate actions published by the London Stock Exchange, and then do a reconciliation between the two,” Clayton continues. “Thanks to Jet Reports all of that happens in Microsoft Excel, which simplifies everything.”

Summing up the impact Jet Reports has had on Suffolk Life’s ability to access, control and act on the information that drives their business, Clayton says: “Jet Reports gives us many advantages. We now have tools for producing reports and streamlining key processes in-house, which allows us to share information across a broad range of internal departments. The cost and time efficiencies are significant – development times are very short to produce quite a sophisticated report. To be able to have the level of abstraction that Jet Reports offers us and to have it delivered in an Excel spreadsheet format, which everyone understands and can use, is crucial to our success.”

This article first appeared in the 2009/10 edition of the Finance on Windows Partner Guide.

Add a comment