Executive Summary
How to cleanse a messy data set, captured manually for years in Excel and critical to the ongoing compliance and profitability of the business?
An alternative asset management firm had significant data quality issues relating to the tracking of signed NDAs & restricted entities, holding master data in Excel.
psKINETIC and the client together using the Appian platform transformed this process, from the risky, manual, time consuming task it once was to a streamlined, data secure and integrated solution.
About the Client
“This client was founded in 2009 with the ambition of creating one of Europe’s leading investment platforms. We focus on delivering best-in-class risk-adjusted returns for our investors across our strategies: Direct Lending, Special Opportunities and High-Yield Credit.”
The Challenges
The age-old problem of starting to track a business process in a simple Excel sheet, soon results in a business-critical function relying on an unwieldy, complicated spreadsheet with patchy or unreliable data.
This is a common challenge across the industry, with a data collection approach that was poorly defined initially which has led to an inefficient and perhaps risky area of the business.
In this case, the data regards the tracking of signed NDAs and what non-public information is held by the firm, restricting activities against that entity for other areas of the business. The tracking document therefore has the tricky balancing act of providing accurate information to ensure regulatory compliance, while also trying to be as up to date as possible and not restrict teams unnecessarily which would reduce income opportunity for the business.
The Solution
A six-week project to develop a POC and roadmap the solution strategy was followed by a 3-month project to deliver release 1 into production. Built on the Appian platform using a modular and extensible approach, the release 1 solution focused on ensuring the existing spreadsheet could be deprecated.
The data was moved to be stored in a secure cloud database in the clients existing Azure landscape, and a workflow built in Appian to support the process to manage this data.
The solution was also integrated with two existing solutions in the their landscape, in order to make data available to the Legal team in a central view rather than moving between applications to perform the process.
Results
The new application has transformed the process and deprecated the existing spreadsheet. The process now allows for requests from the deal teams to be handled by the legal team more quickly than previously. The data is also more reliable as out of date entries and incorrect Excel formulae are no longer present, as well as having the data from the other internal applications available in one place has made the process more efficient.
Further features can now be defined and implemented, for example, reporting opportunities will open up as more and more structured data is collected, as well as the opportunity to get a wider user base to provide input at the right points in the workflow to reduce manual admin burden on the legal team.