OMS Conversion Project
SUMMARY
An investment manager with the more than $400B in AUM and one of the largest security masters (+200k unique securities) sought to migrate from the on-premises version of their OMS onto the vendor’s SaaS model. Two key factors were driving the decision and the deadlines: 1) their version of Oracle being sunset, and 2) the OMS vendor—Charles River Development*—now offered a SaaS product hosted in Microsoft Azure with plans to eventually sunset new versions of the on-premises product.
CHALLENGES
Charles River’s Investment Management System (CRIMS) was used on-premises by the Investment Manager (IM) for several years. When IMP initially met with the IM, we shared our experience that clients customized most on-premises installations of CRIMS, and some of those customizations present significant barriers to migrating onto the more standardized SaaS solution. In discussions with the IM’s team, they confirmed the following:
Many customizations were implemented over the years, and
Their version of the IMS was significantly behind the vendor’s current, supported version.
✪ The key to successful migration would be quickly identifying mismatches (breaks) that would prevent a smooth transition.
WHAT CAN BREAK?
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Data type differences (especially between Oracle and MSSQL)
Account and Account/Group Mappings
Compliance Rules
Security Master Mismatches
Issuers & Issuer Hierarchies
Brokers & Counterparties
Reference Data (e.g. differences in country/currencies, industries & sectors, etc.)
Lists (watch lists, restricted lists, etc. )
Custom Reporting
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Deprecated tables, columns, and functionality in the application
New tables, fields and functionality in the application
Native reporting tool
User Views
User & Group Permissions
Reference data
DELIVERING THE SOLUTION
How can the reconciliation process become repeatable and easy to manage?
We needed to iterate through the breaks with the team, so having a robust, repeatable solution was essential. We also needed to present the breaks in a simple, easily viewed and understood way, ensuring multiple team members could work simultaneously.
IMP’S CLEAR RECON™
Our proprietary module was designed for the investment management industry. Its streamlined configuration helps project teams leverage the automation that controls budgets and delivers the necessary transparency.
CLEAR Recon™ allows the project team to see breaks and get them resolved.
Of course, identifying breaks is only part of the solution — differences alone don’t help the project team determine the impact of data differences on timelines and functionality. Dumping thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of rows into Excel is often an exercise in futility.
Instead, IMP used CLEAR Recon™ to set field-level tolerances when identifying differences. CLEAR Recon™ also provided summary information via dashboards that allowed the project team to zero in on the following:
🔹 How did a break or type of break impact many securities, positions and accounts?
🔹 What was the impact of the break?
🔹 What actions would provide the quickest results? E.g., fixing country references would resolve 30,000 breaks.
RESULTS
Running the reconciliation cycle in minutes instead of hours had a dramatic effect on the budget:
✓ Work could be multi-streamed
✓ All team members could view results and leverage each other’s findings
✓ Management could see progress in real-time
With CLEAR Recon™, we could confidently see the picture of the IM’s Conversion Readiness to save months of time & budget.
Are you ready for your IMS conversion?
Contact IMP for more information.
*a State Street Corporation
