Case Study: Smith & Williamson achieves rapid, trusted data insights in three weeks with WhereScape RED

Understanding the full capabilities of its data

Smith & Williamson, an independently owned professional and financial services group of over 1,500 people and one of the UK’s top ten accountancy firms, faced fragmented data and slow, inconsistent reporting from legacy UNIX/COBOL systems. Business users relied on divergent Excel and Access workarounds because BI tools could not access the source systems, so IT needed a single, trusted data source; Smith & Williamson selected WhereScape and its WhereScape RED data warehouse automation product to address this challenge.

WhereScape implemented a WhereScape RED pilot, trained the IT team, and built a data warehouse and OLAP cubes that reproduced a nightly extract in three weeks — a task estimated to take several months by traditional coding — while generating richer, granular data for drill-down analysis. As a result, WhereScape delivered faster, documented, and traceable reporting, a single centralised source of trusted data, streamlined reporting processes, and quicker time-to-insight for the business.

Smith & Williamson

Mark Prior

Head of IT