Fund Fact Sheet Production: How Does Your Firm Compare? [Infographic]

Have you ever wondered how your firm stacks up in terms of fund fact sheet release dates and overall production efficiency?

We are in the business of automating fund marketing documents so, naturally, we were curious to learn how the industry performs at large. We already had a pretty good idea, based on our close relationships with fund marketers at a variety of investment management firms. However, we thought it would be interesting to gather some empirical data and publish it for our readers.

Our Product Manager, Noel Rodolfo, conducted a study based on a random sample of 35 fund companies and 175 fact sheets.

His goal was to find out:

• What kind of throughput improvements we can get with document automation versus manual production.
• If larger fund companies are more efficient than smaller ones at producing their fact sheets.
• How automated companies compare with their peers.
• If automation technology actually works to improve production efficiency.

The results from Noel’s study showed us that our gut feeling was pretty right-on.  We know that manual firms can be very efficient, up to a certain point. Our data shows that the average automated firm has 80 funds, while the average manual firm has 30.  However, we know from experience that firms usually consider automating well before they hit 80 funds. The smart firms deploy automation proactively, not after they’ve already reached a scaling problem. We’ve seen scaling problems happen at a production volume of 50 documents per month and at 1500 documents per month — it really depends on the firm and their situation. The study showed that automated firms can produce 4x more fact sheets per day than manual firms.

On the flipside, our data also confirmed our suspicion that automation doesn’t guarantee efficiency. Two of the automated firms in our study had fallen out of efficiency. From our experience, this indicates a bottleneck in their processes. We almost always find this bottleneck to be one of two things: a problem with data management and data quality and/or lack of organization and leadership.  Fact Sheet (and any data-driven marketing) production relies heavily on strong leadership and processes, including clean data that is readily available for the marketing team.

This is just a glimpse into our findings from our study. If you’re interested to learn more, you can download our Mutual Fund Fact Sheet Production Study [2014 Report] — it’s free!

In the meantime, here is a quick look at some of the stats:

For an in-depth look at our study method, resulting data, and key findings, please download our Mutual Fund Fact Sheet Production Study [2018 Report].