October 11, 1999

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Chase Stays Ahead Of Rivals
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"The technology itself was an impediment to a wide-scale rollout [of a reporting system]. As a result, reporting requirements were not being satisfactorily met," says Nicolas Quintana, managing director of Chase's global markets administration division. So Chase sought a new approach to deliver critical data to its users.

The company's main challenge was supporting two groups of people: power users, who create complex reports on an ad hoc basis; and the vast majority of users, who need only to fill out or refresh so-called static reports--standard reports that are compiled only once--says James Chai, VP of front and middle office for securities and treasury, with Chase's global market technology division.

"We needed a tool that was flexible enough to support both types of reporting," Chai says. "Also, we wanted to reduce the complexity of the suite of tools we already had."

Today, Chase uses BusinessObjects 4.1 to manage its foreign exchange, derivatives, and securities products better, and to provide broader data access to its users. The product runs on Sun Solaris servers using an Oracle database.

Business Objects has created an architecture that separates distribution from report generation, an approach that can be particularly beneficial for companies that are running numerous queries and reports. Users can create a report once, schedule the refreshment of the data during off-peak times (such as overnight), then distribute that report securely to other users who need it. This separation feature lets users access the information they need, when they need it, without overburdening the data warehouse.

The architecture is based on and designed to address several assumptions: that business users need to analyze information contained in relational databases, whether in data warehouses, data marts, or supporting third-party enterprise resource planning applications; that Structured Query Language is too complicated for most business users and therefore must be translated into English; and that reports consist of one or more queries, or multidimensional analyses, and associated report formatting.

For Chase, the central repository in BusinessObjects proved to be the most attractive feature. "With the central repository, all our users can hook up to the database, then distribute and consolidate reports without having to resort to E-mail," says Weinberg, adding that the product's sophisticated, mature interface is also a boon to users because it makes the tool easier to use.

Weinberg also likes the fact that BusinessObjects places all the security in the central repository. As a result, the IS staff can control what users can and cannot do with sensitive reports, as well as what data individual users and groups of users can see within a report. The sales force, for example, uses BusinessObjects to understand its performance, to analyze customer activity and buying trends, and to scout out new sales opportunities. Sales managers, meanwhile, use it to review sales performance by individual or by sector, as well as perform sector analyses by portfolio manager, geography, industry, and branch.

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Illustration by Brian Rea

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