Business Challenges
- Complex Environment – Fully integrated business planning and detailed cost allocation solution consisted of eight applications supported by Data Relationship Management (DRM) and Exalytics
- Lengthy Run Times – Increase of data over time led to scalability issues causing various calculations, retrievals, and report run times to increase significantly
- Stale Finance Processes – Ongoing maintenance and a steady flow of system enhancements required across a variety of applications and supporting infrastructure
Solution
- Functional and Technical Support – Maintenance and enhancement services are now managed through a dedicated Managed Services team of technical, process, and functional experts, focused on ongoing education, training, and hands-on support
- Proactive Management – Analyzed existing long-running processes, identified inefficiencies in scripting, re-wrote scripts with up-to-date syntax, and implemented new best practices
- Streamlined Reporting – Aggregate views were created in the existing Aggregate Storage (ASO) cubes based on user retrieves and report scripts and then integrated into the automation process
Impact
- Reliability and Flexibility – EPM environment now runs consistently and remains in an ongoing state of improvement to meet the business users’ ever changing needs
- Lower Cost of Ownership – Total cost of ownership and maintenance has decreased considerably
- Improved speed of calculations, reports, and SmartView ad hoc reporting
- Decreased weekly run times by 1.5 hours and quarterly run times by 12 hours
- Decreased reporting run times by 1.5 hours
- Decreased SmartView refresh times down to 5 seconds
