PackMan

PackMan™ - reporting automation software

Each period-end back office personnel across the globe prepare for client and third party reporting. Many tedious tasks are involved. Check off those that apply to your firm. Does the image below remind you of someone?

new accounts	closed accounts	changed accounts	mail merge data prep	document prep
new relationships	closed relationships	changed relationships	custom programming	group updating
script updating	macro updating	printing	hand-collating	manager approval
corrections	binding	inserting separator pages	addressing	photocopying
scanning	emailing	mailing	web access setup	faxing
filing

Typically, period end reports are printed from a variety of systems and hand assembled, which often results in human errors, wasted personnel time, costly reprinting, slow delivery time to clients/third parties, stress, low moral slow business growth. Industry trends such as T+1 settlement, the fall of Glass-Stegall, rapidly growing market, increased competition, shrinking fee schedules, corporate scandals like Enron and the proliferation of the Internet are pushing firms toward more frequent reporting schedules, more data and faster delivery times. How can firms keep up with these trends and find a solution that will enable growth without impacting the bottom line?

PackMan, a nickname for "Report Package Manager" enables back office operations personnel to perform a one-time setup of personalized client and interested third party report packages. There are three major content items to setup for each package that PackMan easily accommodates without any custom programming or script writing: Documents, Data Sources and Run Time Parameters.

1) Documents: Each client or interested third party package may contain documents from different Windows applications such as Microsoft™ Word™, Excel™, Axys™, Acrobat™, Internet Explorer™, images, text documents and other sources.

2) Data Sources: Each client or interested third party package may have personalized mail merge documents. These documents require data sources from different Windows applications (ACT!™, Goldmine™, Junxture™, Qube™, Outlook™, Protrack™, SQL Server™, Access™, Salesforce.com™, Siebel™, Sales Logix™).

3) Run Time Parameters: Each client or interested third party package is setup to run reports with many specific run time parameters such as: accounts, consolidated groups, unconsolidated groups, composite groups, date ranges and contact data for mail merges. Other run time parameters such as page numbers, PDF file names, times and date stamp formats are setup in PackMan too.

At runtime each client or interested party report package is generated in PDF format, paginated, named, time and date stamped without manual labor or intervention. A log file is created that alerts the user to any errors encountered during the process. The end result is a folder full of PDF files. Each PDF file is a client or report package that can be printed, emailed, faxed or sent to WebReps for secure web access. The image below shows the entire workflow of PackMan.