There are always two aspects to risk–the tangible and the intangible. In 2003, Honeywell implemented SunGard AvantGard's global treasury workstation and FXall's foreign currency trading/settlement Web application. The applications comprised Honeywell's FX hedging solution. One problem: Honeywell's FX trader had to manually take the e-mails and spreadsheets from the 200-plus units, data-mine them into one net trade requirement per currency pair and then execute the hedge. Given the volume of data, reworking mistakes became commonplace.
A team headed up by Santiago Gil, Honeywell's director of corporate finance, and Joseph Nametko, the information technology manager of corporate financial systems, met to solve the problem and decided to keep the integration in-house. "We literally live and breathe this application," says Nametko.
The solution turned out to be an intranet-based foreign exchange Web tool, which sits on Honeywell's intranet, and a cross-application integration module code named FEFCI (foreign exchange forward contract interface). Business units input their FX exposures into the FX Web tool. FEFCI crunches them into trade requirements, formats them and uploads the data via the Net into FXall, where the trades are executed. Trade details are sent to the workstation, which sends them to FEFCI. FEFCI creates the internal trades and sends the details to the workstation, which sends out confirmations.
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The savings in time and effort of the solution is clear: information is entered once, cutting down on errors. But coming up with a number for the savings is tougher. "The [real] savings come from: 1) better controls; and 2) letting people sleep better at night," says Gil. In other words, it's in the intangibles.
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