Raymond James Revamps Document Management

Raymond James Financial is a 17-year document management veteran. In addition to using systems from vendors such as Kofax and Singularity, it developed a proprietary content management solution and its own interface to the workflow engine. Faced with integration and scalability challenges, Raymond James recognized it was time for a change and decided to migrate to a solution stack from BlueThread, K2, and Microsoft SharePoint.

Raymond James traditionally has been a Microsoft shop and Enterprise Architecture participant, and it already owns the SharePoint 2007 licenses. But to all intents and purposes, it was using SharePoint as an intranet solution. “We were looking to leverage more of the middle-office operating system platform capabilities of SharePoint rather than just the simple team site collaborative-type solutions that we had deployed to date,” says Ernie Harris, technology product manager, business technology management at Raymond James.

In particular, SharePoint is a workflow and a full content and records management system. It hooks into other Microsoft productivity tools such as SQL Reporting Services and Excel Services. Moreover, Microsoft business data catalog plugs into the framework.

The BlueThread and K2 solutions are specifically designed to work together, and the applications have been architected to plug directly into SharePoint, therefore minimizing the integration effort.

Raymond James saw this move as an opportunity to improve efficiency. Some of its processes have existed for decades, but they have evolved over time to have many exceptions and circular logic. Instead of simply automating manual processes, the company decided to re-examine them to determine whether they should be automated at all.

Currently, the goal is to replace 70-80 percent of its 800 paper-based forms with online versions using InfoPath and the K2-BlueThread-SharePoint platform. Having done that, the company will be able to capture the initiation point of a process earlier and understand the true cost of an overall transaction in terms of time.

Using the business analytics and business intelligence components that Microsoft provides, Raymond James will be able to collapse transactional data into a single data analysis repository. For the first time the company will be able to do proper business intelligence analysis on its operational transactional flow. Previously, it had to manually assemble the data to accomplish this task.

“The information that we’re going to be dealing with going forward is going to be much more timely,” Harris points out. “That will, of course, make us more nimble.”

Like most organizations, Raymond James is change and risk adverse. Most people have the attitude if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The challenge has been getting people to recognize that some processes are broken.

The company also faces challenges from a technology perspective. SharePoint is on its third major family release, but this one encompasses so much more functionality that it is almost like a version 1 application. K2’s new version of its workflow engine is a complete re-write and re-architecture of its approach to process automation in SharePoint. To all intents and purposes, the BlueThread application also is new.

“We’re dealing with technologies that are essentially very immature,” says Harris. “I won’t use the word ‘bleeding’, but it’s solidly in the cutting edge of solution stacks.”

For now Raymond James intends to use the solution for general operational requests, many of which have to do with supporting account opening and maintenance processes. In the future, the company plans to use it as the focal point for process automation and expand it to be the generic container. For example, if the company were going to bring an entire branch on board, the solution would be the container that would keep track of all the major milestones and provide a holistic view of the environment.

So far the initial releases of the solution have been completed, but the solution is still being pilot tested. Raymond James will have completed the production deployments of all the technologies that support the enterprise at 10,000-user level by the end of 2008 and then it will drop into quarterly releases. The program is designed to be iterative. By the time it has been implemented in the far reaches of the firm, the initially deployed groups will have likely begun improving their processes.

“This solution set marks the coming of age of a Wintel-type implementation being able to handle multi-million transactions per month activities across tens of thousands of users,” says Harris. “It looked like it could do it in the past, but we’re seeing that we can actually accomplish that now.”

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