PensionDCisions banks on business intelligence to give it the market edge.

PensionDCisions (PDC) is a young pension-analysis firm for which business intelligence plays a crucial part of their whole service.

The firm calculates and benchmarks performance for individuals and corporations that use "defined-contribution pensions" - a type of pension that invests the contributions made in individually allocated accounts.

The result of this is that each individual contributor has to have access to their investment information, and this means the IT system must be powerful and robust enough to deal with large quantities of data and queries.

PDC itself does not offer financial advice, but rather takes data from the many available pension providers, manipulates it, and then presents it in a way that is useful to individuals, company managers, financial advisers and pension-industry players alike.

Richard Burrill, PDC's technical director, said, "We use business intelligence to provide things like a single meaningful performance number, a view on risk, a simple view on asset allocation, or a savings rate."

Created in 2005, the founders of PDC have since been building their own database and business intelligence infrastructure using established products. The firm partnered with Microsoft collaborator IMGroup to design and build a system based on Microsoft tools and technologies.

The system uses several Microsoft server products, most notably Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

The pension data itself comes from the administrators of the various different pension schemes, the data originating from their own relational database systems, the platform, whether it be Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or Sybase, not being an issue.

PDC of course requires those administrators to provide data that adheres to data standards and definitions set by PDC (which means everyone knows where everything is), the data extraction being left to its partners.

The extraction, translation and loading processes run under Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, a well known platform (and one very familiar to Contemporary) for building and running the high-performance data-integration systems. The platform allows PDC to ensure the data is of a very high quality.

"It is important to get that right so you can have data that can be compared, and that there can be clear interpretation of it. We are producing key measures at the end of it, so it is important that the data we use and aggregate is top quality and has integrity. Otherwise there is a danger that you will pollute the numbers you produce," says Burrill.

As part of the ETL process, the firm runs a series of clearly defined checks on the data, this operation running under SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.

One great feature of Integration Services is that it is able to flag up any errors and feed these back to the pension partners, a procedure that Burrill describes as "an expected part of the process" and one that the partners find very beneficial.

The data itself sits on PDC's Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database system, which can deal with terabytes of data. Burrill says that an "SQL Server management layer orchestrates the process from end to end" , pulling together multiple pension schemes, multiple feeds ( including an audit trail that records what data is received and when) as well as what errors were detected and how they were dealt with.

In a proven business intelligence fashion, PDC takes the data and builds "cubes", using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. This enables it to manipulate the data and present it with reports and the "dashboards" which have become an integral part of any BI initiative.

In the future the firm plans to integrate the Microsoft Business Intelligence suite into the Microsoft Office 2003/7 applications used, Sharepoint being seen as a key way to deliver information more seamlessly to the end-user's desktop, and offer more co-operation and interactivity.