Magazine Article | March 1, 1998

CD-Recording Saves Bank $3,000 A Month In Report Requests & Printing

For many of Dade Behring's customers, next-day delivery is not good enough. The $1.3 billion laboratory instrument manufacturer often has to ensure same-day delivery. Integrating technologies with its new SAP system helps Dade Behring deliver the goods on time.

Business Solutions, March 1998
Written by: Nancy Senger
Toronto Dominion Bank (TD), in Toronto, Ontario, is Canada's fifth-largest bank, with assets in excess of $100 billion and 24,000 employees worldwide. The bank provides a wide range of services around the world through offices in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore and New York.

TD's New York operation was spending $3,000 every month on printed financial transaction reports to archive its trading data. It was not unusual for a four-foot stack of financial transaction reports to arrive at its offices during a day. These had to be routed to the appropriate people and eventually stored, since securities law requires firms to archive such reports for seven years.

Money managers who wanted custom reports had to request them from headquarters and then wait to receive the information. Additionally, the huge volume of paper generated was causing a shortage of on-site storage space. Retrieval of records from remote storage compounded delays and costs.

Accessing The Data From The Desktop
Managers at TD New York purchased Celerity's (Knoxville, TN) CD WorkWare to archive and retrieve its trading data. CD WorkWare enabled the 50 users attached to the system to access trading data from their desktop PCs over the bank's network. Instead of waiting days for custom reports, they could request one over the network and have it in minutes. Storage problems disappeared because paper was no longer generated by the system.

Implementation of the new system involved connecting the CD-R drive and jukebox to the network. CD WorkWare allowed recording of the daily trading data to CD-R. The bank's New York office receives data from TD Toronto via a NetSoft gateway connecting Toronto's IBM AS400 mid-range computer to New York's ALR PC-based server. A Pioneer 1804X 18-disk CD changer is connected to the server.

Plans For System Expansion
Users access data from the changer via their desktop PCs. Currently, 50 people use the system, and expansion plans are underway to accommodate another 50. The local users are networked via NetWare in a token ring configuration. Celerity is currently installing a similar system for TD Houston, which will soon have 40 to 50 users on the system.

The installation at TD New York eliminated the need to print paper reports and requests for information. This $3,000 per month savings, coupled with the quantum leap improvement in performance and report turnaround time, justified the $75,000 cost of installation.