Synchronised Software has developedan “out of the box” data warehouse which it claims will make customer relationship management more affordablefor superannuation providers,particularly those with multiple legacy systems.To be known as Capital Analysisand Reporting Services (CARS) whenit’s launched as a standalone productin September, the data warehouse emerged out of SyncSoft’s development work for CapitalX, the upgrade to itsCapital platform for which Superpartnersis set to become the first client.
According to the managing director of SyncSoft, Rory Wainer, CARS differentiates itself from CRM tools beforeit by being designed with superannuation in mind, and by delivering data inMicrosoft Word and Excel formats thatdon’t require intervention by the IT department to be understood by a superfund’s administration staff. “It’s a system which incorporates adefinition of a member, it knows what acontribution is, what a benefit paymentis,” Wainer says. SyncSoft claims that because information in the CapitalX data warehouse is stored in ‘cubes’ – preassembled blocks of information designed to be comprehensible to non-IT call centrestaff, where for instance transaction and customer information are stored together – running a report or a query will not slow the overall system.
The business case for running CARS grows with the number of legacy systems an administrator maintains, according to SyncSoft, because it can beintegrated with other systems. Wainer hints that for potential clients of CARS willing to become the first integrators with systems other than CapitalX, SyncSoft will absorb morethan its fair share of the costs involvedin developing the integration, with the upside that it could then use the connection for future clients running thatsystem.Apart from providing “business intelligence”drawn from statistics on themembership base, CARS will be ableto generate annual member statementsand through its workflow system, willenable trustees direct on-line access to service level analysis of their administrator, Wainer says.
