Faster Corporate Reporting

Challanges

Hanne Solheim, the financial controller of EB, has been working within the EB for ten years being the financial director of one of the subsidiary companies for some time and later the acting CFO.

Solheim says: - Previously our subsidiaries made their own balanced scorecards and reports using data from different sources. Too many employees were involved in collecting and handling the data which, by the way, had very variable structures as well as bad quality.

Furthermore these data reports were stored using Excel. Our budgets and analyses produced in Excel, with manual registration which was very time consuming and demanded considerable human recourses. We spent too much time on the reports ad eventually we realized the need for a joint corporate solution.

- We wanted to have it all on a Corporate level and we urged to common data structures having data quality that we could trust. In my point of view it is crucial to base all corporate analyses, reports, presentations and budgets on the very same and unique materials, thus reporting on the same data material you are producing project reports or presenting reports to the management and the board of directors.

One significant goal was to spend more time on analyzing data and producing trustworthy reports, rather than spending our time handling data manually. That is really waste of time and energy.

Furthermore we wanted to make our budgeting and analyzing processes more efficient.

Solution

- In total we needed a brand new corporate reporting system in which we could standardize our system and make the data handling more efficient. We also needed to automate the production of the core card reports.
The EB Corporation evaluated no less than six different offers before they made their final decision. Their choice was a total comprehensive package delivered by Affecto Norway, comprising of consulting services, Business Objects (BO) Reporting solutions and Informatica Data Warehousing.

- The EB Corporation’s choice if vendor is based on Affecto’s total solution, good references and their competitive price. They also presented a trustworthy simulated project model during the tender period and we found that very useful. Their products have simple interfaces and the products handle data immigration automatically. We are able to change the design of the graphics and we (migth) add comments info this picture as well (as well as add comments in to pictures). Thus the use and work is very flexible.

We experience the importance of good documentation during the consulting period and the effects of this concerning the project. Together with Affecto we eventually found the key solution of the final success.

Benefits

- Originally we ran data updates two times a day. Now we have online updates with ‘fresh’ figures four times per hour, figures that both managers and more than hundred users can utilize in their daily operations, based on accurate and high quality data. No doubt the future is based on Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, says Hanne Solem.

- It has been an elaborating project that is now fully implemented. We are continually working on further development of the Data Warehouse solution(s). If we were to do it all over again, I certainly would choose Affecto to be our partner.

Using Affecto’s solutions the EB has reduced both time and money.