Prepress
CM-CIC Asset Management chooses Quark for automated publishing of financial information
Thursday 11. November 2010 - Based on QuarkXPress Server, Quarks dynamic publishing solution allows CM-CIC Asset Management (CM-CIC AM), a member of the Crédit Mutuel-CIC group, to automate financial sheet production while retaining data integrity and optimizing the workflow.
Every month, CM-CIC Asset Management produces two-page UCITS (Undertakings for Collective Investments in Transferable Securities) sheets which include numerous financial data in text, table and graph format. Available on the bank’s networks, they are a major source of financial information and are therefore carefully examined since they indicate the past and future trends of the investment funds.
From a manual process to a dynamic publishing solution
Gilbert Godard, Head of Project IT at Euro Information Développement (EID), describes the long-winded procedure the company had to go through in the past to produce such information: “Previously, everything was done manually. We produced about 150 UCITS financial sheets every month putting together vital data such as stats and graphs from Excel and PowerPoint files that Ghislaine Brugère, manager of the Publishing division, entered in Excel. This process had shown its limits, however, with an obvious lack of rationalisation, major risks of error – related to manual copy-paste operations – and an increasingly large, but non-standardised information flow. Through its business expertise, Quark was the obvious solution to our requirements, matching the specifications perfectly.”
Creation of a data repository
“We first defined the user interface,” explains Gilbert Godard, “then the data well diagram, which automates data searching, and an MMI (Man-Machine Interface) model.” Several templates were then created, corresponding to the requirements issued by CM-CIC Asset Management, and a fusion engine was produced to allow data transfer to these templates. Lastly, the application (QuarkXPress Server, fusion engine and configurations) was deployed and configured within two weeks.
3 times as many documents, 3 times faster
After 18 months of document production, CM-CIC Asset Management can confidently say that Quarks solution has proved extremely efficient. “Previously, we published about 150 sheets on the 23rd of every month, which was not very good,” agrees Ghislaine Brugère. “With Quarks solution, we are now able to bring forward publication to the first half of each month and we could shorten the production time even more if we did not have to integrate external data from Europerformance. As soon as we can calculate these performance measurements internally, the production and distribution times will probably be less than one week.”