Genera Trust Partnership Relies on JAMS for Success

Company Background

Genera Trust Corporation (GTC), a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 diversified financial services company, offers a comprehensive array of services for major financial service companies mutual fund companies, insurance companies, and other institutional investors. Chartered in 1968 and based in San Francisco, CA, GTC employs nearly 900 people.

GTC works closely with its clients to develop innovative, customized solutions to assist them in competing effectively in today's hotly-contested financial services arena. GTC's services enable its clients to:

• Provide timely, accurate reporting of portfolio performance on a daily basis.
• Handle increasingly complex investment strategies and securities.
• Deal with complicated and detailed regulatory reports.

The Challenge

GTC was determined to increase the value of its service to clients by providing timely, accurate on-demand reporting of portfolio performance. Portfolio accounting is a mission-critical, "heartbeat" application for GTC.

But it was clear they would have to re-engineer existing business processes to accomplish this objective, and to handle an anticipated growth from the current 1,400 daily portfolios to well over 2,200 by the end of 2008.

The last few years have challenged all organizations to enhance existing services while integrating ever-changing technologies and innovative application solutions. The downside for GTC was that the accounting process had become an aggregate of disparate technologies, home-grown programs, and customized, off-the-shelf applications. And maintaining the existing system was becoming more and more of a problem; the complexity of the system was making it more and more difficult to pinpoint failures and to correct them in a timely fashion.

GTC concluded that to achieve their SLA goals, they should re-build their application on a .NET framework and procure one software package that would receive clients' files (portfolios), create a database, perform the required accounting tasks, and automatically and instantly alert appropriate personnel if an error occurred anywhere in the process. The envisioned solution was a sophisticated enterprise job scheduling system.

The project team developed the following list of requirements with which the ideal solution should comply.

• Mainframe-class scheduling functionality and capabilities
• Native support for .NET
• Wizard and graphic calendars to automate job scheduling
• Support for job and file dependencies
• Support for processor affinity and load balancing
• Scalability
• Comprehensive alerting
• Centralized management of global batch workload
• Hot standby capability to eliminate the single point of failure
• 7x24 standard support
• Ability to implement within a tight timeframe

The Solution

GTC selected JAMS from MVP Systems as the choice solution. Other products were eliminated for a number of reasons: failure to comply with several of the technical requirements, lack of 7x24 support, lack of flexibility, and/or ease of use. "Framework solutions" were eliminated due to cost and the tight timeframe for implementation.

The Implementation

GTC has made use of virtually all of the JAMS product features. They use the calendaring to create a production job schedule and automatically schedule jobs. The productivity of the operations staff has improved with the automated scheduling of routine but critical work i.e. moving and copying files, zipping files, printing and distributing reports, FTP transfers, and database loads, backups and archives. Job workflow is controlled via job and file dependencies. Alerting is used to notify personnel of both normal status and exception conditions.

GTC's System Administrator had this to say about the project: "The time constraints to meet our deadlines were very tight. But JAMS is easy to grasp and with a little practice we were able to move jobs into production very quickly. The implementation was made easier by MVP's support. There are always hiccups in a project of this size but having MVP support personnel onsite and available via phone and email made resolution of issues much faster and easier."

"We had onsite training arranged as well. This afforded us an economical way to train our entire operations staff, programmers, business analysts, and system administrators. And MVP's support has been very good. Their staff is available after regular business hours, and they have an excellent knowledge of the product, and a firm grasp on JAMS' relationship with the platforms and applications that coexist with JAMS."

GTC started with JAMS running on a Windows cluster and has since expanded JAMS across several Windows, HPUX, and Linux Servers.

Benefits

A GTC Customer Support Representative extols the benefits of using JAMS. "One of the first new jobs we installed involved a contractual deadline which, if violated, could cost our company a substantial amount of money in penalties. We were alerted immediately that a transfer had failed, and discovered it was a communication malfunction on the client's side of the connection. We were able to contact the client in time, provide evidence of the problem, and suggest an alternate method to transfer the information. That one alert saved more than the cost of the software. It allowed us to impress a client with our responsiveness and, even more important, it was an opportunity to establish an enduring customer relationship."

"Our users are responsible for deadlines critical times at which files must be available for transmission to our clients. In the past, users would call us if a transfer had not taken place. Now the shoe is on the other foot. With JAMS, we are alerted immediately if the files are not present by a specific time. The operations staff and the users both receive alerts on critical files. It has allowed us to make the transition from a reactive to proactive mode. In most instances we now are able to solve problems before the client or users are aware of them."

What can JAMS do for you?

We would be delighted to discuss your specific requirements and explain exactly how JAMS can benefit your organization. Just email us at Sales@JAMSScheduler.com.