Thomson Financial Transforms Global Business Operations With Serena Business Mashups
Serena Business Mashups enable double digit increase in employee productivity; increased efficiency, visibility, and customer satisfaction. Thomson Financial, a subsidiary of Thomson Corporation, employs 8,700 employees, delivering integrated information, technology, and applications to the financial services industry. A few years ago, the company analyzed its business processes and found common business challenges: issues of accountability and visibility, as well as "handoff" or workflow breakdowns between people, departments, and systems. While these are common issues, the company addressed them in a creative and unique way. With a focus on streamlining sales, services, and operational processes, the company took a traditional back-office technology tool—Serena Mashup Composer—and employed it as a front-office solution to engage employees, eliminate handoffs and lock down processes. As a result, Thomson Financial has seen a double digit increase in employee productivity gains along with many other benefits. Today, thirty four percent of the workforce uses Serena Business Mashups to manage day-to-day activities.
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Topdanmark Makes Their Mark in the Industry with Serena Software
When the second largest full-featured commercial and private life insurance company in Denmark realized that meeting their customer expectations was at risk due to their own internal processes, they quickly made some extensive, well-founded decisions to course correct. Realizing that the siloed processes and diverse technology that had developed over time no longer served their best interest, the team responsible for defining the internal processes for their IT department took on the challenge. "When we started the project with Serena Dimensions, it was because we wanted to find a better way to handle the way we manage changes in our system portfolio. We needed a stronger, more collaborative and cohesive process," said Peter Reetz, IT Architect. "When the customer has a problem, we need to solve the problem regardless of what platform it affects." This new thinking meant moving from a silo-based development model that had been developed and used for over 20 years to a project-based model.
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UBS Banks on Serena for Software Configuration Management
UBS is a leading global wealth manager, top tier investment banking and securities firm, and one of the largest global asset managers. The company employs over 80,000 people. When UBS Switzerland decided to migrate its core banking applications from a Unisys environment to IBM mainframe hardware, the IT department knew they needed a configuration management system that could handle a massive influx of change to their systems. The company needed a scalable, flexible configuration management solution to effectively manage the migration to the IBM mainframe, control the application lifecycle, and track all changes to meet audit requirements. UBS selected Serena ChangeMan ZMF for its scalable, highly flexible configuration management solution for the mainframe. Serena ChangeMan ZMF has helped UBS to gain control of the software configuration management process, streamline application development, foster confidence in test results, and reduce application processing errors—while handling huge volumes of change. Using Serena ChangeMan ZMF, 485,000 component builds are submitted; 190,000 package promotions are processed; and 800,000 component versions are installed per year.
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Among other things, delivering 60,000 electronic pages to auditors within 10 days of their request has helped Philadelphia Stock Exchange set a new standard for the futures industry
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) is one of the most diverse exchanges in the world, offering equities, options, currencies, indexes, and futures. The regional exchange serves as a “wholesaler” for large financial services firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. PHLX is audited every year by both internal and external auditors. Prior to Serena, with six to seven signatures required for every change request, paper-based requests could take several days to get approved. When it came time for audits, IT spent days wading through thousands of documents to find specific items for auditors. The company selected Serena TeamTrack for its comprehensive, highly flexible solution. The new IT process management solution has transformed IT operations at PHLX. Twenty five hundred hours of administrative work have been saved per year; the change approval process has been significantly reduced due to automation; uptime for all mission critical systems is 100 percent; and IT is handling more change requests without hiring additional employees.
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CheckFree Stays on the Leading Edge of Internet Banking With Serena TeamTrack
CheckFree Corporation provides financial electronic commerce services and products to organizations around the world. With skyrocketing Internet use fueling growth, the company implemented the Serena® TeamTrack® solution to increase efficiency, enhance issue management, and maintain IT quality.
CheckFree relies on TeamTrack workflows to visualize, orchestrate, and enforce application development, software quality and product development processes across three divisions. TeamTrack improves communication and provides a process for accountability and ownership of issues. The system’s powerful reporting capabilities drive continuous improvement, generating a record of every issue resolution and providing data points that the company can use over time to pinpoint problem areas, trends, and improvements. TeamTrack has been instrumental in helping CheckFree improve quality—supporting the company’s pursuit of Six Sigma standards and contributing to CheckFree’s achievement of 99.999% dial-tone quality (a measure of site accessibility).
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Serena Dimensions Helps ANZ Control Development Processes and Achieve Compliance
ANZ, one of the largest banks in the world serving a global customer base, needed an integrated solution to help them gain control of development processes and meet CMM Level 2 requirements within the ANZ Investment Bank (ANZ IB) division. They selected Serena® Dimensions™ application lifecycle management to provide an enterprise-class change management framework.
Serena Dimensions provides ANZ with a fully integrated, end-to-end solution that enables total project visibility and accountability. ANZ relies on Dimensions for everything from comprehensive process control to versioning, baseline management, issue management, release management, and build and workflow management. Automatically enforced change processes are customizable and repeatable, and a complete audit trail allows ANZ to easily meet CMM Level 2 compliance requirements. In addition, Dimensions helps improve communication and efficiency among ANZ development team members, while reducing administration requirements.
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InfoComp Improves Operations with Serena PVCS Professional
Faced with rapid growth and a change management software vendor unable to meet its evolving workflow needs, InfoComp, a provider of software solutions for wealth management, sought a more robust and flexible solution. InfoComp chose to move to the Serena® PVCS Professional™ suite, the world’s most popular issue, version, and build management solution.
PVCS Professional has enabled InfoComp to achieve control over application development, improve quality, boost team productivity, and sustain schedule reliability. Easy customization allows the company to manage changing workflow needs and a Web interface improves efficiency and communication both internally and externally. In addition, powerful reporting helps prevent issues, reduces time to locate issues, and allows development and testing teams to anticipate workloads. Overall, the solution helps Infocomp improve software quality and service to its global customers.
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Financial Leader Raises Quality Levels with Serena Dimensions
Alm. Brand (Gen. Fire), one of Denmark's largest and oldest financial groups, offers a broad range of insurance and pension products, plus extensive banking and financing operations. The company needed to implement change management processes that would help drive quality improvements. Looking for a solution that would support their Windows and web-based environment while upholding the high standards of traditional centralized development best practices, Alm. Brand selected Serena Dimensions.
Today, Serena Dimensions enables Alm. Breand to visualize, orchestrate, and enforce a whole range of methods and processes that help the company develop and deliver higher quality solutions. Improved visiblity, unified processes, structured work methods, and consistent process documentation allow them to more effectively manage shared development components in a multi-project environment. In addition, Serena Dimensions provides the protection and version control of source code that are crucial throughout software lifecycles.
AMP Gains Control of Product Lifecycles with Serena Dimensions
AMP, one of Australia's largest financial services companies, wanted to improve the quality of customer service and boost delivery rates while reducing errors and risks inherent in their aggressive development cycles. AMP needed a process-driven, next generation tool that would enable them to manage the entire product lifecycle. The company implemented Serena Dimensions for a complete, process-based configuration management solution.
Serena Dimensions enables AMP to manage a complex development environment of multiple concurrent development streams, multiple vendors, and multiple databases. With Dimensions, AMP is able to visualize, orchestrate, and enforce processes for managing change across this distributed environment. AMP has been able to adapt Serena Dimensions to their methodology, which has led to some remarkable results including a 20 percent increase in productivity, a 50 percent reduction in migration error rates, and delivery of better quality products at a lower cost.
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