1. The stock broking firm Asit C Mehta Investment Intermediates Ltd deployed the MAIA 1Key business intelligence solution to help ease the load on their IT department from a large number of daily data and report requests from users. 2. The company evaluated MAIA 1Key and found that it could help generate reports and access data more efficiently for business users in a user-friendly manner. 3. After a successful proof of concept and pilot implementation, the company is now in the final stages of a full deployment of MAIA 1Key to standardize reporting and data access across the organization.

1. M|A|N|A|G|E|M|E|N|T
PEER-TO-PEER
BI helps brokerage
firm up its operations
Asit C Mehta
Investment
Intermediates Ltd
deployed MAIA 1Key
to ease the load on its
IT department.
By Varun Aggarwal
A
sit C Mehta Investment Although requests would manner to arrive at a busi- gence solution using data
Intermediates Ltd, a often be similar, separate ness decision which will help warehousing concepts. The
stock broking firm has queries needed to be generat- to take the organisation for- solution had to be user
over 300 branches apart from ed in each instance. As most ward. There were a large friendly as the users were
franchisees. An enormous of the data was lying in dif- number of individual data- business users and might
number of query requests are ferent file formats, digging bases and MIS and reports resisted a complex applica-
generated each day from a out information was difficult. that were required. The IT tion. So the required solution
large number of business Prasad Bapat, CIO, department was receiving had to enable and empower
users within the company. In Asit C Mehta, Investment a large number of query users to generate those
the past, every little query Intermediates Ltd says, “A lot requests and requests for for- reports and use them more
had to be manually generated of data is accumulated at the matting etc. We realised that efficiently to meet their fre-
by the IT team once a request data centre and we have to a lot of reporting requirement quently changing require-
came in from the user. use this data in an intelligent was coming from different ments to make use of the
departments and different same data in different ways.
Benefits of 1key users including the top man- The company decided to go
agement and the down the for MAIA intelligence’s 1Key
IT hours are spent on more productive projects. line users. This requirement solution and the deployment
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Complete freedom for end users who can avail of a vari- came with different formats began in January 2007. It is
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ety of reports. and different parameters.” currently in its final phase
Business users have access to reliable information. This task had become a of completion.
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Reduction in analysis time for business users. burden on the software and
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The evaluation phase
Improved accuracy in decision-making. IT department of the compa-
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Improved efficiencies and streamlined operations. ny. The company was look- A lot of time and effort
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ing for some business intelli- was going into the relatively
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2. M|A|N|A|G|E|M|E|N|T
About the company
simple job of reporting, data
collection and correction.
The company was exploring
T he company belongs to Mumbai based “Nucleus Group” and is engaged in broking in
some tools for MIS reporting shares, money, forex, commodities and BPO services. The group is promoted by Asit C
and came to know about this Mehta jointly with Mrs. Deena A. Mehta.
solution. “We did some eval- The activities in the capital market started in the year 1986 as a brokerage house for retail
uation on a preliminary basis investors and market making in select scrips and extended to financial intermediation activities
with a few reports, which in money, capital and currency markets.
were quite acceptable even Later the group diversified into development of databases, back office application for banks
by the end users for their and corporate, document management solutions and Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
first hand confirmation. and commodities broking.
When we realised that that The company is in the process of being empanelled as a Depository Participant for custody
the users were comfortable of various commodities traded on the National Commodity Exchanges. The company also
with the solution, and we provides guidance to the investors through investor education seminars and regular research
finally decided to go with publication.
1Key.”
After evaluating MAIA’s
1key solution, the company required based on the user’s we are still in the final stage with which a particular user
decided to deploy it in a feedback, there weren’t of implementation.” can see only limited reports
phased manner. As a proof any major issues related to Bapat feels that user and thus we can implement
of concept, the company performance. training is an important the security part as well.
applied some sample data- Bapat says, “Initially aspect for any kind of soft- With 1key, the same report
bases to generate simple there was some communica- ware deployment. As the end can be taken to XML or any
queries. Bapat adds, “After tion gap at the implementa- users in the company are all other source, like it is now
the successful completion of tion level, wherein the users business users, so they are possible to view the reports
this phase they moved to a wanted something and they not entirely comfortable with even at home. The imple-
more difficult and a larger were given something else. IT tools. So it will take some mentation part was done by
database wherein about one The existing reports were before they get the feel 1key’s partner. We had given
crore of records were there given in the same format of the ‘cool’ features and them 30 sample reports. Most
and then when we were and fine tuning the report appreciate that all their of them have been complete-
finally satisfied with the kind and the flexible features requirements are readily ly implemented. The users
of results that were achieved, were not explored by the available and solvable. are finding them satisfactory
we were ready to use the user. We have a complain as it easy to use with drag
Benefits achieved
solution in our organisation. register used by the technol- and drop features. With Excel
We thought that it would be a ogy department. So now we “Prior to the MAIA 1key users were finding it difficult
good idea to standardise this are looking forward to use implementation we were fir- to do it using cut and
as a tool for all our business paste. 1key has simplified
requirements. So based on this task.”
that we awarded them a con-
The next step
tract and they had a partner
Prior to the MAIA 1key implementation
with them who would be The company had cur-
doing the actual implementa- rently deployed the solution
we were firing the queries manually using
tion. So it was a good tie up in four different departments.
between a good product Bapat says that so far the
query analyser and pasting the results
company and an equally response from the end user
responsible implementer has been good. “We are try-
into Excel, formatting and presenting it
who would take it forward ing to figure out how many
and make it successful.” users are actually using the
to the management. In 1key all these
Bapat says that the solu- application for the best of
tion has been deployed in their use. It still might take a
four departments. In the first little time before all users get
tasks can be done in a single shot
phase they converted existing comfortable with the soft-
reports into 1key. Today ware,” he says. The company
when a request comes in, is planning to deploy 1key as
users can be told that they an organisation wide tool and
can satisfy the request those reports to analyse ing the queries manually the entire deployment across
themselves using this new things like the number of using query analyser and all departments shall be
solution. complaints, the average time then pasting it into Excel, completed in a short period
to solve a particular com- then formatting it and of time.
Bridging communication plaint, how many com- presenting it to the manage- The new features that
gaps plaints have taken more than ment. That was a very would be added to the cur-
Unlike most of the soft- the stipulated time to tedious task and was rently deployed application
ware deployments, the com- resolve. We were previously very time consuming. Plus, would be that of charts etc
pany did not face much of a doing this in Excel and now whenever the management which would also be done
challenge in the deployment this will be available in 1key. asked for new format, we soon. Bapat concludes, “We
of the 1key solution. Though The report is there but we had to redesign all the have taken a conscious deci-
a lot of fine tuning was are not currently using it as queries and formatting has sion to deploy this tool
to be redone. In 1key all organisation-wide. Only the
System Configuration these tasks can be done in a first stage is completed. So
single shot, using the cube we have not used to its full
Server Pentium 4-single CPU 2.0 MHz, 1 GB RAM, feature of 1key. This was a potential. We are able to
hardware 80 GB Hard Disk very good feature that I convert the existing reports
found,” says Bapat. and with some amount of
Server Windows 2000 server, IIS, SQL Server Express Bilal the MIS software rework and with user feed-
software manager at Asit C Mehta back. One thing which I real-
Investment Intermediates Ltd ly like is the drill down fea-
Client Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Disk
opines, “Previously we had ture, and there are some cal-
hardware
to maintain the reports on culation features that are
some spare hard disks. Now available. The chart feature
Client Windows 98/XP
we can assign a user’s securi- will be deployed within a
software
ty features in the system, few days.”
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