Though an increasing number of firms pride themselves on their ability to fire out reports within the first week of the quarter, it seems that most firms still produce and mail out their statements in the second or third week. Yes, I said “mail out.” Even firms that have invested in the ability to post their reports to a web portal still mail most of their reports out due to low adoption rates by their clients. Investment advisors that don’t get their reports out within the first three weeks of quarter end are operating outside of the norm.
There are 13 weeks in a quarter. Given that most firms send quarter end reports during week two, operations folks aren’t thinking about doing an upgrade in week three. They’re busy catching up on what they didn’t do in weeks one and two, while they were managing the client reporting process. That leaves ten possible weeks for a system upgrade. Weeks four through six are ideal, giving your firm adequate time to test your systems and apply fixes as necessary.
Weeks seven to 13 become increasingly unappealing; lucky number 13 is the worst possible time to perform a system upgrade. Most people in the investment business know this. With 25 years of experience installing Advent products, I consider the time approaching quarter end an obvious no-fly zone for in-place system upgrades, no matter how competent you are. I was stunned yesterday when I received a call from a customer related to a system upgrade.
Apparently, someone working with Advent talked them into upgrading to Axys 3.8.5 last week, telling them they wouldn’t have any problems with the upgrade. When you are unfamiliar with a client site, broad-sweeping statements like this are all too easy to make. After the upgrade, their billing reports didn’t work. The representative doing the upgrade was able to fix the standard billing report, but could not fix our compound billing report, which is used to generate client invoices.
Billing Report (created via compound reporting macros and replang)
Due to this issue, our customer’s billing process was on hold this week until the issue was resolved. We received their call yesterday afternoon, and called them back before close of business, but didn’t hear from them until today. We promptly connected to their system, reviewed their issue and resolved it; however, this incident certainly had the potential to end in technical tragedy.
I recently blogged on the different versions of Axys 3.x we see in use working with Advent clients. The blog indicated that Axys 3.8.5 is a solid product release and should be an easy upgrade for users, but also underscored the need for users with customizations to anticipate difficulties.
Advent typically shows good sense in planning. For example, in Axys to APX conversions, systems are run in parallel for months. I am disappointed to hear about this incident, which I can only hope is an oversight, not the modus operandi for Axys upgrades.
Some people feel the need to push ahead no matter how close they are to quarter end. Perhaps they make a bit more progress in doing so. Still the question for me is what benefit this upgrade had last week versus a couple weeks from now when quarter end reports have been produced. If there is a benefit that offsets the risk, I am all for it. In this case, I just don’t see it – not for my client.
About the Author:
Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com or contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.