Versatility in the pursuit of progress at the heart of Pilot House Associates’ fully integrated RMS

The Challenge

Over the past three decades, Pilot House Associates has seen considerable growth across their team, asset base, and strategies. As their portfolio diversified and relationships expanded, the need for robust software solutions to manage data and workflows became increasingly important. Initially, the investment operations team adopted a leading and highly regarded enterprise content management (ECM) solution for document storage and workflow management, which although favored by the operations team, fell short on the investment team’s need for a note-centric workflow. To adapt, the investment team resorted to using a hybrid of note-taking apps, which only added complexity to data management and collaboration.

The systems in place worked well enough to get the job done but were a challenge for new employees and anyone who wasn’t already familiar with the system to adopt quickly. The need for an integrated CRM-like system became evident when a new Managing Director highlighted the difficulty in tracking ideas, meeting notes, and other interactions using the existing system. Pilot House’s April Robinson, VP of Investment Operations, and John Powell, Enterprise Cloud Architect – always on the lookout for bestin-class solutions – observed the gaps and limitations of the disparate systems they had in place across the firm and set out to find best-of-breed solutions that would enable their cross-functional teams to work smarter and more efficiently.

The Solution

Pilot House began researching solutions and surveying with their family office and endowment peers to better understand what types of systems and best practices were available in the market. That’s when they came across Bipsync, which they quickly recognized could solve for both their CRM, document and workflow management needs.

Bipsync’s configurable research management software (RMS) offered the versatility that Pilot House needed in order to support not only the investment teams, but also downstream to the accounting team. Not long after the initial demo, Pilot House realized that they had found the solution they were looking for and began working with Bipsync’s implementation team to design dashboards, pipelines, and views tailored specifically to the needs of each team and their investment strategy. They also began leveraging Bipsync’s API to seamlessly integrate Bipsync with other best-of-breed tools within their technology stack.

“These things that Bipsync is solving for allow me and my team to be more forward-looking and focus on strategic projects like business logic.”

– John Powell, Enterprise Cloud Architect

The Approach

Shared attitudes to open collaboration

Pilot House had already extensively mapped out their workflows and processes, holding internal discussions to raise questions, walk through scenarios, and create detailed diagrams of the ideal future state tech stack for the firm. This included Bipsync alongside other systems including a portfolio aggregation system. Using these pre-designed diagrams and after a series of meetings with the Pilot House team to better understand their requirements, Bipsync’s implementation team quickly adapted its RMS platform to fit each team’s unique processes. This included implementing dashboards and pipelines to track manager interactions for the investment team, manage capital calls and distributions for the operations team, and handle K-1 accounting workflows, and more.

By leveraging Bipsync’s Rules Engine, which automates workflows and notifications, as well as Bipsync’s API, the implementation team helped configure the system to trigger downstream workflows within Bipsync itself and across their integrated tech stack – creating efficiencies across their entire investment lifecycle and processes.

Pilot House shared that the relationship established between them and the Bipsync teams has been unlike other vendors they’ve worked with in the past. They consider the Bipsync team a “thought partner” who they can collaborate with to find solutions to operational challenges.

API integration and extensibility

When Pilot House began their search, they knew that a robust API would be a key requirement for any solution they implemented.

While Bipsync acts as the single source-of-truth and productivity environment within their tech stack, its comprehensive API allows the Pilot House IT team to enhance other elements of their tech ecosystem. Since its implementation, the Pilot House team has successfully integrated Bipsync with its portfolio aggregation system, general ledger system and its data extraction and retrieval technology platform for documents. The integrations have also expanded to include other in-house applications such as their K-1 data extraction application, built by the Pilot House IT team. These integrations enable the seamless flow of critical data and information between the systems to streamline each stage of Pilot House’s investment process.

The Results

In less than a year, Bipsync was successfully rolled out to several teams at Pilot House. This achievement is made all the more remarkable for being originally envisaged as a ring-fenced project for the investment team, but which grew to encompass practically all investmentrelated operations.

The platform’s intuitive design proved a hit even with the least tech-savvy team members, evidenced by a senior executive who, despite his initial reluctance, quickly adapted to using a personalized dashboard that simplified his interaction with the system. This widespread adoption has significantly enhanced collaboration across departments, doubled teamwide efficiency, and allowed the firm to focus more on innovation and strategic initiatives.

“I’d say we’ve more than doubled in efficiencies just with the addition of Bipsync. And I’m probably grossly understating it.”

– April Robinson, Vice President of Investment Operations