Services : Case Study : GAM Typesetting

Company Profile

GAM are global asset managers with over 300 funds and CHF 80 billion in assets under management. GAM was founding in 1983, pioneered the multi-manager concept and are now a world leader in multi-manager investing, offering a wide range of styles and strategies. They have considerable experience of alternative investments and have been providing clients with access to hedge funds for over 20 years. They have nine offices world-wide and employ over 800 staff.

Project Brief

GAM produce scores of fund prospectuses and reports each year for use by clients and intermediaries. These documents are expensive to produce and often have to be produced and updated at short notice. They are normally produced using traditional typesetting methods. Electrum and Perivan worked together to provide GAM with a typesetting solution based on MS Word that reduced timescales, costs and errors.

Solution

Electrum developed a small suite of document templates and Microsoft Word add-ins that enabled the prospectuses to be typeset in MS Word.

    

The use of Word and add-ins enabled users to proof and correct documents in MS Word before converting them to print-ready PDFs for high-quality printing by Perivan.

The templates ensured that the layout, fonts and styles followed GAM’s corporate style, and the add-in made it very easy to create and maintain headings, tables, charts and lists.

Basing the solution around MS Word allowed the authors to stay in control and use tools they were familiar with, and Electrum’s template technology ensured that the documents looked as though they had been professionally typeset.

The documents were previewed, checked and corrected in MS Word, which made it much easier to find and correct errors. This reduced timescales and costs and completely eliminated the risk of new errors being introduced by the traditional correction process.

By removing the need for typesetting, and the inevitable ‘ping-pong’ between author and typesetter with proofs and corrections, GAM was able to cut the document production timescales in half.

Feature	Benefit
Document templates in your house style	Consistent branding, layout and style; quick and easy document creation
Documents typeset in MS Word	Familiar, easy to use tools; easier proofing and correction; no risk of new errors being introduced; self-service eliminates errors, iterations and delays
Print-ready PDFs	Reduce print timescales and costs; high-quality, professional documents
Custom toolbar containing commands to insert and format text, lists, tables, charts, and layout elements	Easily create and maintain document content; Consistent branding, layout and style