Services : Case Study : Research Templates

Company Profile

Ambrian provide corporate finance, stockbroking and equity research services to the mining and oil & gas sectors. Founded in 2001, they are a young company, but have quickly established themselves as a leading financial advisor across the sector, and their clients have included some of the largest mining companies in the world.

Project Brief

Ambrian’s analysts produce two to three equity research documents a week, and these are widely disseminated across the sector. As a young company it was important that they quickly establish their brand, so the documents had to look great. But it was also essential that they could be produced to tight timescales with limited resources.

Solution

Electrum developed a suite of Microsoft Word templates for their key documents, and a set of Excel tools for quickly formatting charts.

Basing the solution around Microsoft Office allowed the analysts to stay in control and use a tool they were familiar with. Electrum’s template technology ensured that the documents looked as though they had been professionally typeset and could produce press-ready PDFs.

By removing the need for typesetting and the inevitable to-and-fro for proofs and corrections, Ambrian were able to cut their document production timescales from 5 days to half a day.
Data integration was a key part to the solution, and the templates automatically load data direct from the analysts’ model spreadsheets and a Bloomberg data feed. This enables analysts to produce a skeleton document almost instantly, further reducing time to market.

Feature	Benefit
Research document templates	Quick and easy, self service : cuts-out errors, iterations and delays
Pre-defined document layout and text, table and chart styles, in your house style	Productive, (automation and short-cut commands) Consistent branding, look and feel
Connected directly to datasource	Error free, (no re-keying of data, no copy and paste, no ad-hoc styles and layouts)
Connect directly to existing datasources	Little impact on existing infrastructure
Custom toolbar containing commands to insert and format tables, charts, and layout elements.	Easily format manually controlled content.
Workflow/approval	Improves productivity and consistency