We often hear from organizations that SimCorp Dimension is complex; queries are raised as to why it cannot do this or that. Many times, a pain point in an organization is just something you get used to, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With this blog we wanted to share with the community some recent ideas on areas that you can improve upon and where a solution does exist. Solutions that will increase operational efficiency, automate tasks and reduce operational risk and cost.
Improve the way you promote configuration. The transport tool is great for promoting configuration from your development environment into your test and productio
n environments. But there are always a few windows that are missing, meaning you must manually promote that configuration from screen shots. Often these are the more complex windows where errors are more likely to happen.
But there is a way to eliminate promoting configuration from screen shots that can be done in a fast and reliable way. We have done this with great success, reducing the number of errors caused by promoting manually.
Outcome: Dimensional Community’s solution helps reduce your company’s operational risk by eliminating manual errors when promoting configuration into your production environment.
Isolate your batch setup from being changed by normal users. You have probably been there before: a batch job has failed during the night or created wrong results because a user had changed an underlying segment or a related create job that was attached to a batch job. Or some other setup that no one thought was part of the nightly batch flow.
We can help you to ensure that your batch flow remains unchanged in two ways:
1. Identify which windows and setups are used in batch
2. Apply restricted authorizations to these windows and setups easily, automatically and fast
The outcome of Dimensional Community’s approach will ensure that no normal user can change or delete a setup that is used in your batch workflows; only super users given special permissions will be able to do so. Best of all, once this is setup, the same functionality can be used to easily maintain the authorization and expand it to other business areas if required.
Outcome: This has helped our clients secure their batch processes, reduce nightly failures and reduce operational risk. More importantly it has increased the efficiency of SimCorp Dimension and saved our customers hundreds of thousands of dollars in wrong valuations and missed deadlines.
Automate exception handling. A lot of organizations rely on manually researching and resolving repeat failures that happen every single day; for example, importing new security trades from your front office system when the security does not yet exist in SCD. That means someone must manually make a request for the missing security, wait for a response, populate it in SCD and then manually get the trade to process again in SCD.
It doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to automate this and other repeat failures in SimCorp Dimension.
When a certain event failure happens, it is possible to trigger another event that in our example would pull the security identifier from the message, parse it into a request message to the data provider, wait until a response is received, import the security into the SCD tables and then re-process the failed trade. All you would notice is a small delay in the import of the trade.
Outcome: Dimensional Community has helped clients automate their exception handling, resulting in more accurate and real-time position data to support your front office and IBOR. More importantly, it has reduced reconciliation breaks and cost of operation, increased efficiency and allows your staff to focus on other more important business improvements.
Show your Chart of Accounts setup from SCD. If you are using SimCorp Dimensions General Ledger, the setup can easily become overwhelmingly large with hundreds, if not thousands, of entries. Trying to validate this against your corporate chart of accounts can be challenging.
It is possible to create a complete picture of your finance schemes, finance accounts, and segment conditions that makes up your chart of accounts in SimCorp Dimension and show this in an excel view. You can then use this to reconcile with your corporate chart of accounts. Even better, you can build a validator where you can ‘test’ any changes you plan on making in SimCorp Dimension, returning the order of finance schemes it would choose. For example, enter a Coupon transaction on a USD fixed corporate bond and it would return any scheme it would hit, ordered by priority.
Outcome: We have helped clients dramatically reduce the number of accounting errors, leading to a significant drop in cancellations and re-bookings by the staff. Not to mention the time to investigate why it didn’t hit the account you expected. This gives your staff more time to focus on regular business operations, thereby increasing operational efficiency and a reduction in cost.
Viewing segments conditions. Segments are used everywhere, and chances are that everyone in your organization can create and change segments. That means you easily lose control over them, making it harder to make changes in SCD.
It is possible to create a view that shows the condition of all your segments in a readable format, not just as internal keys or stack number. This can prove helpful if, for example, you want to change or remove the value of a free code or of a field list. It can help when you want to clean up your segments to reduce the number of potentially unused segments. And it can help identify field values you have deleted where the segments retain a condition of <unknown>.
Outcome: This is just one example of a control you can put in place to give transparency to your setup, reduce risk of unforeseen errors and ensure a stable production environment. We know how important it is to empower people using the system, but humans do make mistakes.
Explain your auxiliary jobs. Auxiliary jobs are useful to control your transaction workflows, create workarounds and manage extracts. But, as time goes by, some may have become redundant or their usage may have changed.
We have helped SimCorp Dimension customers like you to list all your auxiliary jobs, explain what they do, when they were last used and what conditions they use. Being able to understand and maintain auxiliary jobs has helped similar organizations improve their setup as they now understand what it does.
Outcome: Dimensional Community can help you create visibility of your auxiliary jobs so you can understand them and know how to adjust them yourself. This has increased staff knowledge, reduced cost of external consultants and increased operational efficiency and automation.
These are just some examples that could benefit your organization. We are very interested in hearing from you about your experience and happy to share more details with you.