FORRS
Problem-Focused and Solution-Driven Business Consulting

In the business landscape, a faster time-to-market is often defined as a company’s key to success. If companies cannot develop at a pace that allows them to win, they will fall behind very quickly. Notably, today’s global and digitalised companies require a more streamlined IT infrastructure to ensure seamless workflow and enterprise-wide growth. And this digitalisation journey is driving the need for any company in current times. Managing legacy infrastructures and applications, while trying to increase the speed of innovation and technological change has become a challenge for many organisations across many industries. Especially highly competitive environments like the financial markets and the energy sector requires a very specialized skill set. Re-designing and effectuating the high level of complexity within the value chains of financial or energy firms requires seasoned knowledge and experience. Especially in a time where time-to-market is an important factor in today's decision making processes, alongside necessary guidance from senior management.

The need of the hour is procuring tailor-fit methods that solve various enterprise-wide hindrances and underlying enterprise architecture (EA) problems for a growing company; legacy needs to be reduced, and modernized technologies need to be utilized faster. At this juncture, to help such companies ensure the success of an enterprise’s mission-critical project across their services value chain, German management consulting firm, FORRS, offers the most comprehensive EA services. “Our capabilities, expertise, and services extend across all elements of the value chain and lifecycle of trading products in financial, energy, and commodities markets as well,” enthuses Markus Riess, the managing director of FORRS.

Founded in 2015, FORRS was conceptualised as a management consulting firm with a strong focus on driving results for the financial, energy, and commodities markets with a large emphasis to trading. However, according to Riess, today, EA has become broader and more diversified with the rapid adoption and utilisation of cloud-based technologies in almost every facet of a business.

This makes the designing and implementation of EA an even more difficult task than in the past. EA concerns business as well as IT leaders likewise. FORRS tackles this challenge with an approach that leverages its employees’ enterprise management talents in addition to their programming skills. “Our teams have a clear understanding of EA, but also of the various business processes, which makes it easier to solve overall business-related problems that involve building or changing company-wide systems with new technologies,” adds Riess. That being said, the company does not simply effectuate a pure technology transformation for a client; but also focuses on a parallel transformation of the associated business processes, since this is typically required.“Focus of a transformation needs to be twofold, business and IT, in order to develop a powerful target EA that meets the strategic goals of every client”, Riess adds.

FORRS, moreover, supports its clients in obtaining the desired business results by transforming traditional trading architectures into a more modern and automated EA with its highly skilled professionals and extensive services. Alongside, the company also offers solution design services that streamline process automation, digitalisation, and AI-component designing. “We provide risk management advisory, data mining, and analytics with stochastic modelling capabilities,” adds Riess. With a team of veterans who have worked in various trading environments for all asset classes like equities, interest rates, Forex, commodities, and energy, FORRS further empowers financial organisations and energy trading companies in effectively adopting cloud technologies to stay competitive and relevant in respective marketplaces.

To further elucidate on FORRS’ core competencies, Riess shares that, currently, the focus of many projects is, for example, to migrate from a traditional, Excel sheet-based manual workflow to a fully automated, architecture. This applies to all parts of the trading value chain, be it in front-office environments or back-office. Clients want to move away from error-prone, manual processes to an extremely high level of automation, ideally leveraging cloud technologies like AWS of Azure. The clear target is to further reduce time to markets and reduce operational issues at the same time. Also we clearly see that clients want to utilize the potential of hyper scaler technologies and build knowledge and skills around this booming technologies. “After we completed a project with one of our clients, they now run their trading operations 24/7 on an AWS environment,” he recalls. The client witnessed a significant decrease in operational risks and a dramatic increase in the stability of their trading profits.

With such holistic services, FORRS is set to help companies throughout Europe in streamlining and improving their EA and especially trading operations. Moving forward, the company intends to continue catering to the growing needs of the energy and finance industries, while gradually increasing offerings in the data analytics space. With an ambitious drive for results, active global partnerships, and data analytics, FORRS promises successful business transformations for ambitious organisations in need of comprehensive EA.