EPM Success for Geophysical Survey Company

PREDICTif  successfully assists major geophysical survey company to select the right Enterprise Performance Management product for its financial reporting and analysis needs CUSTOMER: A leading seismic data-acquisition imaging and software systems company who assists petroleum exploration companies to identify and measure subsurface geological structures. REQUIRED CAPABILITIES

• Financial consolidation and reporting
• Interactive analysis
• Forecasting and Budgeting
• Oracle Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Financial Reporting, Financial Data Management

CHALLENGES The Customer used an out-dated solution that was under-utilized and deficient in terms of data mining and planning automation. As a result, the business was heavily dependent upon IT for both support of its existing solution and development of new functionality when the enterprise required. The software deployed was also 2 major versions behind that of the publicly released version and had run out of vendor support. Significant growth in its Solutions business units served as a catalyst to replace its manual, error-prone, labor intensive financial reporting and planning solution with a more automated, streamlined and efficient one. The company, comprised of multiple legal entities that span the globe, was challenged with having to manage all of its financial operations in a single, multicurrency environment. It also had needs to transform individual financial plans from a group of entities into a single, consolidated corporate level plan.  All this made the existing solution severely limiting in terms of the ability to predict its revenue and costs for each of its business units. SCOPE Needing objective and unbiased professional advice on various EPM solutions on the market, the Customer engaged with PREDICTif who led a rigorous product selection process to ensure that they procured the right EPM product for its current and future needs. The overall goal was to assist the Customer in identifying an EPM product that met its current and future business needs:

• Integrate seamlessly with its main ERP solution (Infor’s Syteline), its existing Microsoft SQL Server based data warehouse and miscellaneous data sources;
• Upgrade its antiquated and unsupported EPM architecture to a modern and sustainable one;
• Automate and streamline its financial reporting and planning processes eliminating manual, redundant and time-consuming steps;
• Enable drill-downs and what-if analysis for gaining insight and better financial plans;
• Establish a single version of the truth and generate accurate/ up-to-date reports;
• Leverage both web and Excel as available interfaces for ad-hoc analysis, interactive report authoring and viewing;
• Offer an easy-to-learn and easy-to use tool that enables the business to achieve self-sufficiency; and
• Ensure long term, advantageous total cost of ownership.

SOLUTION PREDICTif led a systematic product selection process leveraging its extensive experience with EPM solutions, vertical specific evaluation criteria and its own, proprietary production selection templates to ensure a thorough evaluation was undertaken. PREDICTif led the preparation of the PoC, the coordination of the vendors and finally, the short-listing and evaluation/selection of vendors who best addressed Customer’s business requirements. Over the course of the evaluation, PREDICTif:

• Assisted the Customer in its identification of the appropriate use cases that addressed all critical business needs;
• Prepared the use case documentation and accompanying data;
• Worked with Customer personnel in order to facilitate software vendors’ involvement in the PoC;
• Supported the Customer as needed throughout their participation in the evaluation process;
• Administered the different software vendors’ PoC’s and validated their results;
• Incorporated PREDICTif’s proprietary software evaluation process and compared/contrasted its weighted scoring criteria against that of the differing, competing vendor technologies;
• Led vendor’ demos and meetings in an effort to contribute towards the information gathering process;
• Provided cost estimates for license and implementation costs; and
• Produced a high level roadmap and long term implementation plan for each technology so that the Customer understood not only the current state, but also the future vision of the chosen technology.

The PoC was conducted in parallel by three vendors over the course of a two-week period.  We aggregated all the gathered information and then, used PREDICTif’s weighted software selection criteria to contrast that against the Customer’s business objectives to render an option on a best of breed solution. After evaluating several leading vendors, Oracle Hyperion/Essbase was selected for a number of reasons:

• Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software meets the key business requirements, enables the automation of planning and reporting processes and powers the finance team to perform data mining and ad-hoc analysis;
• Oracle Hyperion is easy to use, easy to implement and easy to support/maintain;
• It is a cost effective, high return investment, conducive to quick wins, resulting in lower total cost of ownership;
• It establishes a solid platform for future reporting and analysis needs; and
• Oracle utilizes updated and modern technologies, presents a strategic product development roadmap and enjoys both financial as well as organizational stability.

RESULTS Post product selection, the Customer negotiated with Oracle and ultimately procured the Hyperion product stack including Essbase, Hyperion Financial Reporting, Hyperion Planning and Financial Data Manager (FDM). Utilizing the acquired Oracle stack of products, the PREDICTif team successfully implemented and replaced the customer’s outdated solution with that of a new one fully automating countless functions and in the process, eliminating nearly half of the Excel worksheets it previously utilized resulting in increased productivity. Additionally, PREDICTif:

• Upgraded the customer’s financial reporting and analysis architecture to a modern and fully supported technology;
• Increased the architectures performance resulting in a more robust and stable environment;
• Eliminated a multitude of manual, error-prone and time-consuming steps resulting in a more efficient and accurate financial analysis and reporting process;
• Delivered to the business users the ability to do ad-hoc analysis and create their own reports;
• Delivered a solution to the business that the customer personnel were able to support and maintain without significant IT support or involvement; and
• Provided the business a solution that resulted in a significant return on investment.