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Stanford Management Company Sees High Returns on Business Intelligence Investment From Information Builders
Stanford University's Asset Management Company Improves Reporting and Analysis With WebFOCUS
| Source: Information Builders
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - November 15, 2007) - Information Builders, the leader in production
business intelligence (BI) systems,
today announced that Stanford Management Company (SMC) has successfully
implemented WebFOCUS as its reporting standard to help streamline
operations and get a more complete view of its data.
SMC manages more than $18 billion in endowments and investments for
Stanford University, Stanford Hospital & Clinics, and Lucile Packard
Children's Hospital. It is a nonprofit organization that operates as a
division of the university with oversight by a board of directors appointed
by the university's board of trustees. The company was suffering from an
inability to integrate and report on data across all its systems. The
process for extracting and analyzing data required multiple steps to access
data from disparate sources. The company also wanted the data to be
uploaded and stored in a data mart.
SMC needed a solution that could help integrate all the data sources on the
back-end and ensure that users were receiving reports with accurate data in
a timely and efficient manner. The company selected WebFOCUS for its ease
of use, scalability, and data integration strengths. It went right to work
implementing WebFOCUS for all its reporting and analysis needs, resulting
in three immediate takeaways for the users.
"Professional endowment portfolio management is critical to ensure
strategic cohesion between an institutional mission, its funding
requirements, and the desired endowment performance," said Gene Wong,
director of performance and management information systems at SMC.
"Academic endowments are a highly competitive market, and we needed a way
to ensure that all of our managers, trustees, and partners had a way to
access and analyze information in a streamlined, timely manner. WebFOCUS
helped us to create a reporting structure that gives us the answers we
need, when we need them."
SMC has used WebFOCUS to develop a number of systems, some of which provide
up-to-date variances in investment valuations, which make the
reconciliation process much simpler and also offers an audit trail to SMC
valuations. The company developed another system, which integrates
Stanford's cash ledger system, displays real-time cash activity, and
reconciles to its custodian on a nightly basis. At an executive level, the
company has also created reports using WebFOCUS, which provides quarterly
returns on the endowment and gives the board of directors and CEO insight
into the performance of the overall portfolio.
The Stanford Investment Pool generated a phenomenal 23 percent return for
the 12 months ending June 30. "Besides our top-notch managers and
investment team, we fundamentally re-engineered our back-end process flow
from our custodian Melon/BONY," said Wong. "The Information Builders tools
are so powerful and flexible that they allowed us to implement an entirely
new business model in less than six months. The greater access to
pre-analyzed data contributed to better management and control of the
overall return. The team at Information Builders walked us though the
process from the beginning; I highly recommend the company as a BI
partner."
"Stanford University is one of the most well respected and well funded
universities in the world," said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder, Information
Builders. "Running an endowment as large as the one SMC administers,
involves managing the process and flow of information across many systems
and groups. By implementing a business intelligence solution, the company
can help meet the challenge of not only managing the endowment, but also
maximizing the returns."
About Stanford Management Company
The Stanford Management Company (SMC) was established in 1991 to manage
Stanford's financial and real estate assets. SMC is a division of the
University with oversight by a Board of Directors appointed by the
University Board of Trustees. The SMC board consists of investment and real
estate professionals, the University President, Chief Financial Officer,
Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and the CEO of SMC.
The board approves SMC asset allocation targets, oversees the hiring of
external asset managers, and evaluates the performance of SMC investments
and professionals. SMC oversees approximately $18.0 billion of endowment
and trust assets, expendable funds, and commercial real estate investments.
About Information Builders
Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence
and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions
to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the
world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides
the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global
extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical,
and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users.
Information Builders subsidiary iWay Software provides state of the art,
multi-purpose integration engines that address all SOA, application, data, and information management
requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading
software platform providers. Together, these products give Information
Builders' customers the ability to live up to the company motto: "Your
business. No barriers."
Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided
quality software and superior services for 31 years to more than 12,000
customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government
agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the
company employs 1,600 people and has over 350 business partners. For more
information visit www.informationbuilders.com.