Executive summary

>Threadneedle publishes regular fund factbooks and factsheets for independent financial advisers and investors in both English and German. Creating such documents manually from information held on spreadsheets or databases is costly, time consuming and increases the potential for error.

Benefits

• Substantial time and cost savings: once the information source and templates are set up, publishing becomes a simple automated process.
• Improved quality: Threadneedle staff can concentrate on maintaining accurate financial data, not on the publishing process.
• Easy expansion: new documents can be added by simply creating a new information source and designing an appropriate template.

About Threadneedle

>Established in 1994, Threadneedle is the fourth largest UK investment fund manager. Investment policy is based on a structured, disciplined, risk-controlled approach to portfolio management.

Threadneedle is a member of Zurich Financial Services, one of the world’s largest investment and insurance companies.

Objective

>Threadneedle produces two types of documents for its funds. There is an 80-page databook for independent financial advisers, providing details of all available funds. Then, for each fund, there is a summary for investors to highlight its key features. The financial information for these documents is maintained in Microsoft Excel.

>Threadneedle had been using an external supplier to generate the documents, using a largely manual process. The cycle of layout, proofing and printing for each update took two weeks. Recognising that there was scope to achieve a better result more efficiently, the company began to investigate the options.

>Seeing a chance to increase efficiency, Threadneedle invited Mekon to advise on database publishing solutions. The new system means that work that formerly took two weeks can now be completed in five days.

Challenges

• Database publishing depends on a structured information source, which Threadneedle did not initially have.
• Template design was made more complicated by the fixed two-page format, into which a large quantity of data had to be fitted.
• Information had to be made available as printed documents and on a Website.

Evaluation

>Mekon identified database publishing as the most suitable approach to the project. However, this technique requires a structured, consistent information source from which to extract data.

>The first stage was to design a database that could accept information entered using Microsoft Excel or Word. Mekon engineered this so that users would be able to place their files into a directory and then click on a customised FrameMaker option to publish a dataset. The option triggers a customised data import process that reads the data from the source files, transfers it into the publishing database and then copies it into a FrameMaker template.

Document Design

>The templates use a combination of static text, graphics and placeholders. The latter are used to identify points at which data is to be inserted.

>The data can be modified between being extracted from the database and inserted into a template. For example, the full names of funds stored on the database are often long and detailed. These are mapped onto the shorter brand names under which funds are marketed.

Extended functionality

>Mekon used its own tool, FrameAC, to enhance FrameMaker’s online functionality. FrameAC is an ActiveX control that allows developers to control FrameMaker programmatically and add interoperability with databases.

An ongoing relationship

The main benefit of database publishing is its flexibility. As Threadneedle’s staff become more comfortable with the processes, it is a simple matter to extend the database and create new templates. Consequently, there is no limit to the applications for such a publishing system within an organisation, provided that there is suitable data available.

>Mekon’s original brief has already been extended to include Belgian language documents, as well as the original English and German. Such extensions are achieved by setting up an information source and templates to suit the new requirement. The publishing system then creates the new documents in exactly the same way as before.

  Back to top