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T. Rowe Price

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"Business Objects has transformed our way of thinking about how we deliver investment, plan, and operational data. Our company tagline is, 'Invest with confidence.' I think it's fair to say that we've made this kind of investment in Business Objects, and it has paid off handsomely."

David Kline
Assistant Vice President
T. Rowe Price

Challenge

T. Rowe Price is an independent global investment management firm and mutual fund manager based in Baltimore, Maryland. T. Rowe Price manages more than $396.8 billion (as of September 30, 2007) in assets for individuals and some of the world's leading corporations, public retirement plans, foundations, and endowments. For over a decade, the company has relied on software from Business Objects, an SAP company, to handle critical reporting needs - and, increasingly, sophisticated business intelligence (BI) tasks - across the enterprise.

Responsibility for the various Business Objects deployments at T. Rowe Price is shared by assistant vice presidents Kip Barkley and David Kline. Barkley oversees the internal deployment, including human resources (HR), corporate finance, and project management, as well as an extranet and multiple dashboards for Retirement Plan Services. (The extranet application, Client Access Reporting System, received the Business Objects Excellence Award in 2000.) Kline focuses on the investments business and a recently implemented Marketing and Investments Data Repository (MIDR) system.

Although their deployments and constituencies are diverse, Barkley and Kline agree on the high-level BI challenge that faces T. Rowe Price. "It's all about enhancing our ability to deliver critical investment, plan, and operational data faster and more accurately to our customers, both internal and external," says Kline. Adds Barkley, "Ultimately, we want to deliver high-quality information to our consumers, so they can make the best possible decisions."

Approach

The newest project in Barkley's sphere of influence centers on the use of dashboards. "The relationship managers in our Retirement Plan Services group were 'data-poor,'" he says. "They lacked a good, consistent mechanism for obtaining data about the 401(k) plan sponsors they serve."

According to Barkley, his team had several key goals in mind when they launched the dashboard project. "The information had to be specific to the relationship managers' customers," he says. "It needed to be relevant and timely, and detailed enough to be significant but not overwhelming. And, the presentation had to be appealing to nontechnical users."

BusinessObjects™ Dashboard Builder met all these criteria. "It delivers quick hits of information, with the ability to drill down to a lower level of detail if necessary," Barkley says. "It is much more aesthetically pleasing than standard reports, and so people are more likely to use it. The sliced dimensions allow for a customer-specific display of the data, including key performance indicators such as employee participation, profitability, and deferral rates. The Business Objects solution has really empowered our relationship managers, and they are very happy with it." The success of this project opens the door to the creation of additional dashboards for other business units, as well as a possible move toward the use of scorecards.

Kline's MIDR project is even newer. The warehouse, built using a dimensional model, receives data from multiple sources - including internal and external recordkeeping systems, fund accounting systems, and vendor data from Lipper and Morningstar - via extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes. MIDR contains approximately 60,000 portfolios and focuses primarily on performance and related statistics.

Ensuring the consistency of MIDR data is paramount. "This data is delivered to multiple consumers," says Kline. "It goes to our clients, our institutional business, and our senior management. It goes into marketing materials and advertisements, and it's posted on our retail Web site. So the data must be accurate, and it must go out the exact same way to every downstream system. The Business Objects universe that we put on top of the MIDR warehouse, coupled with a customized version of InfoView, gives us confidence that all consumers are seeing the same information."

The performance department analysts at T. Rowe Price are especially grateful for MIDR. "The data was originally tracked using spreadsheets," says Kline. "From there, it grew into a small Access database, and later to Microsoft SQL Server with a Visual Basic front end. But the system wasn't expandable, and it was very manual in nature - a fact that occasionally led to errors. At month end, the analysts were working 60 to 70 hours a week to load the data. With MIDR, we're able to provide information much more quickly and accurately to our end customers; the ability to process ad hoc queries in near real time is an added benefit."

Results

For Barkley, consistency and ease of use are the key benefits of his Business Objects systems, and he says the software is often leveraged to increase the efficiency of T. Rowe Price business units. "For example, when our corporate finance area moved to Oracle Financials, they told us, 'It's very simple. We want the same thing now that we had with our previous Business Objects system.' So we rebuilt those universes and set them on top of Oracle Financials. During the course of that project, however, we discovered that one of their people was spending 20 to 30 hours a week running reports, putting them in spreadsheets, and mailing them out to cost center managers all over the firm. We were able to interface BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® with another server that contained the expense vouchers, and then bring up the images. It took one of my employees about a day to put this new system together, and the resulting time savings was significant."

For Kline, integration heads the list. "I think Business Objects has the broadest suite of products in the business intelligence space," he says. "We love the fact that everything works together, and that we don't have to worry about integrating several different tools. Users don't need to know whether their reports are built in Desktop Intelligence, Web Intelligence, or Crystal Reports®; they just get what they need, and we choose the tool based on the requirements of the report. We know that we have one answer, one way of calculating the data, and that the same answer is delivered to all the systems within the firm.

"Business Objects has transformed our way of thinking about how we deliver investment, plan, and operational data," he concludes. "Our company tagline is, 'Invest with confidence.' I think it's fair to say that we've made this kind of investment in Business Objects, and it has paid off handsomely."

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