Services : Case Study : Lombard Street Research

Company Profile

Lombard Street Research provides independent macroeconomic forecasting and analysis to asset managers, banks and global corporations around the world in order to improve their investment thinking, their returns and their management of risk.

Project Brief

Lombard Street’s analysts produce a detailed investment research report every month under the title: Global Investment Opportunities. These reports contain information on a number of key themes and investment recommendations, using charts, tables and side-bars to illustrate and inform.

   

Solution

Electrum developed a Microsoft Word template for Lombard’s Global Investment Opportunities report and a set of Word and Excel add-ins for quickly formatting and inserting charts, tables and side-bars.

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

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 template ensured that the layout, fonts and styles followed Lombard’s corporate style, and the add-ins made it very easy to create and maintain headings, tables, charts, lists and side-bar comments.

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 typesetting process.

By removing the need for typesetting, and the inevitable ‘ping-pong’ between author and typesetter with proofs and corrections, Lombard was able to cut their document production timescales from 10 days to one day.

Feature	Benefit
Research document template	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, lists, side-bar comments and layout elements	Easily format manually controlled content.
Workflow/approval	Improves productivity and consistency