Private Equity Firm
Implementing a Data Management Strategy

Business Challenge

This Group is the world's largest private equity firm, with approximately $87 billion of equity capital under management.  It manages 65 funds across four fund families including: leveraged buyouts, growth capital, real estate and leveraged finance investments.  The firm employs approximately 900 employees in 19 countries to uncover opportunities in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East/North Africa and Latin America.  More than 1,300 investors from 72 countries entrust them with their capital and their reputations.

Like many organizations in today’s competitive business environments, the firm was facing a mountain of data from a variety of sources.  Legacy systems, home-grown software, SaaS (Software as a Service) are just a few of the disparate sources managing data for the organization.  Furthermore, these systems and business processes were frequently siloed by department or business unit.  The enterprise was inundated with requests for data that were representative of the entire organization, not unique to each business unit.  Managing the new and old data and delivering it in a timely, accurate manner was increasingly difficult.

Solution

Acumen Solutions was able to leverage their team of experienced business intelligence and data management resources to implement a data management strategy.  The solution included a data conforming strategy, an integration logging and audit process, and developed new processing standards published to all technical users.  Specific examples include:

• Conformed legacy and current SaaS payroll provider data into the data warehouse to provide a single source of reporting
• Implemented a robust integration database flexible enough in architecture to replace single solution customizations for individual integration issues
• Developed complete models from business process down to physical data models for consumption by multiple business units and technical resources
• Analyzed legacy data and compared to newly developed models to identify discrepancies and inaccuracies in employee data
• Developed a new system for managing Foreign Currency quotes for uniform distribution across the enterprise enabling consistency and interoperability among business units
• Created a data integration between an external joint venture partner’s system which allowed the client to provide consolidated quarterly reports to their investors
• Re-designed reporting infrastructure to eliminate hard-coding of report parameters and created user-configurable fields allowing users to make ‘on-the-fly’ changes to their reports
• Implemented a solution to automate the production of investment financial statements using the Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse infrastructure
• Analyzed performance of existing ETL jobs and developed ETL jobs across different systems into the data warehouse

Technology / Business Expertise

• Data Analysis
• Data Modeling
• ETL Development

Return on Investment

• Identified nearly $1 million in money owed the firm that would have previously gone unreported
• Enabled Foreign Currency quote consistency across business units for streamlined interoperability
• Realized average performance gains of over 800% by implementing ETL best practices with no identified defects
• Eliminated costly ad-hoc development projects for reporting changes with redesigned reporting structure, saving the enterprise weeks of development every quarter
• Automated investment financial statements eliminated intensive 3-4 week, multi-person manual Excel processes, saving the enterprise thousands of dollars
• Cost savings of integration customizations through standardized database broadens the scope of solutions available to the enterprise within the same cost category

Private Equity Firm - Implementing a Data Management Strategy