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Managing audits and dealing with multi-jurisdictional tax matters of multi-national operations is the core of Moore Stephens International's business. The scope of its global client management extends, therefore, beyond the delivery of compliance services to advising on international business structures and tax planning to minimise tax liabilities.

TALKING ACROSS PLATFORMS
Moore Stephens LLP operates more than two hundred desktop applications and in excess of five hundred databases. One of the significant challenges faced by any organisation with a complex IT infrastructure is coordinating and controlling how information moves around these disparate systems. The organisation needed a tool to supplement the standard feature set of its document management system, such as delivering a weekly summary of all correspondence to department managers and assembling reports of outstanding purchase orders.

"We wanted to integrate data from multiple systems and then generate reports and alerts from the combined data. We knew that we needed a cross-platform monitoring, reporting and alerting tool. Basically doing things that individual products were not capable of doing - each product has its own reporting system, which only talks to its own data," explained Charles Verrier, Information & Database Architect, Moore Stephens LLP. "We knew that there were areas that were not performing as well as they could and it was about getting a tool to do that work; in some cases, to replace old, custom written solutions that had built up over the years."

ERROR CHECKING THE DM SYSTEM
The first task that Moore Stephens implemented using Orbis Software's TaskCentre was to routinely monitor the database of the organisation's document management system, to identify cases where document usage was not adhering to the company's internal processes or according to best practice. It also monitored usage patterns to identify data problems in the database, which would then alert the IT department.

"TaskCentre automatically sends alert messages to users to let them know about a problem before it becomes a problem. We can spot patterns in the data that, from experience, we can tell are going to cause the user a problem," explained Verrier. "We can now send them an email saying this document is going to be a problem if you don't do something, or you need to change the way you are handling it. We have those set to run twice a week."

MONITORING MULTIPLE DATABASES
The biggest usage, in terms of the number of alerts, stems from monitoring multiple databases to look for cases when data goes out of synchronisation - for example, when a member of staff gets married and changes their surname. As the surname can reside in any number of databases across the organisation it can be time-consuming to keep the records up-to-date.

"We use TaskCentre to monitor multiple databases and look for cases where data should be the same, but has gone out of sync. It then generates a regular report for the necessary people to inform them that they need to manually sort out a discrepancy that shouldn't be there," said Verrier. "Sometimes you can write custom routines to sort that out, but it's not always possible. There could be regulatory or contractual reasons why we are not allowed to directly write to another database. In that case, the best we can do is identify a synchronisation problem and email a request that an authorised person fixes the data."

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