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The Bank of
Ireland and Luís Simões Group use Intuitive, Easy-to-Use
Dashboards to Keep a Finger on the Pulse of their Businesses
Interactive dashboards have become mission critical among
customers who need to keep a finger on the pulse of their
businesses, according to Hyperion. Customers are responding
quite favorably to the benefits of Hyperion’s easy-to-use
and personalized dashboards, including the unrivaled ability
for even novice users to both monitor business activities at
a high level and, when necessary, drill deep into source
data to uncover root causes of problems or opportunities.
“Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s easy to devise strategies
and plans; what’s difficult is executing them. This requires
good people armed with powerful information tools and clear
direction from the top,” said Wayne Eckerson, director of
research and service for TDWI: The Data Warehousing
Institute and author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring,
Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. “The most critical
elements of a Business Performance Management solution are
the tools that let users monitor and analyze performance in
a timely manner and take action to improve performance—in
other words, a performance dashboard.”
Bank of Ireland Group, the largest Irish bank listed by
total assets, was challenged to create a more focused
offering to its customers involving individual, expert
relationship management. Bank personnel quickly realized
that their outdated paper-based systems and spreadsheets
would not suffice.
“We wanted to provide a more focused offering to customers.
The implication for managers and staff within our Branch
Network was that we needed some way to measure performance
in a more meaningful way,” said Eugene Leddy, manager,
retail MI shared services at Bank of Ireland. “With its
intuitive, Web-enabled dashboard interface, Hyperion
dashboards enable all relevant Bank of Ireland employees to
benefit from insightful analyses and reports. By delivering
business-critical information, and not just data, this
drives an interactive understanding of business
opportunities and trends, empowering employees to make
optimal decisions.”
The Luís Simões Group, a transportation company operating in
Portugal, Spain and Morocco, is also leveraging the
flexibility of Hyperion dashboard technology to uncover
important business insights and transform its mission and
strategies into an operative vision. Prior to implementing
Hyperion dashboards, the group leaned heavily on individual
personnel who used spreadsheet programs for data collection,
correction and interpretation—leaving little time for
analysis of their findings.
“We risked not being objective at analyzing data due to the
large amount of information provided by traditional
systems,” said Fernanda Dantas, director of management
control and planning, The Luís Simões Group. “It is critical
that we’re able to make decisions based on reliable and
consistent information. Hyperion dashboards allow us to
provide better reallocation of human and technical resources
and to obtain information quickly and in a dynamic, flexible
and objective way. It provides quality and reliability—a
necessity in a process dedicated to decision-making
support.”
Dashboards offer both line of business and IT department
benefits, including:
• Increased user productivity – personalized, interactive
dashboards provide users with precisely the information they
need, and can be linked with reports and scorecards ,
• Reduced costs of enterprise-class BI by delivering a
system that is low in maintenance, and easy for users to
work with – in fact it requires almost no training
• Increased productivity of IT through the deployment of
pre-defined dashboard views that need be built just once,
allowing users to personalize and interact with them on the
fly – and without additional IT customization
**************************************
Carphone Warehouse is set to greatly improve its approach to
planning, budgeting and financial reporting by investing in
technology solutions from Hyperion.
“As a new generation retailer, we aim to exceed our
customer’s expectations by providing an innovative approach
to service,” said Nigel Langstaff, group director of Finance
at Carphone Warehouse. “To stay at the front of this dynamic
and rapidly moving industry, we constantly develop new ideas
and services for our customers.”
“We realized we needed to apply a similarly innovative
approach to our financial management and planning systems.
Hyperion offers us the best way to do this by providing a
truly integrated approach.”
Carphone Warehouse purchased Hyperion Planning, Hyperion
Financial Management and Hyperion Master Data Management
Server. Around 200 users will benefit from the use of this
software.
Carphone Warehouse was already a Hyperion Essbase customer,
and has increased the number of users from 32 to nearly 200.
Hyperion Essbase allows for centralized maintenance of
dimensions, hierarchies, calculations and business rules.
Carphone Warehouse intends to now expand its usage of
Hyperion Essbase to create a unified analytical platform.
As an integral part of the Hyperion Business Performance
Management offering, Carphone Warehouse will also use
Hyperion Planning, a centralized, Web-based solution, to
track and monitor business plans and forecasts, translating
strategic objectives into operational goals and targets.
“For financial planning, we had previously used Microsoft
Excel,” says Langstaff. “With Hyperion Planning, we now have
the ability to more easily generate rolling forecasts. It
will be a big improvement over our manually intensive use of
spreadsheets.”
Hyperion Financial Management, a web-based application for
financial consolidation and reporting, is owned and
maintained by Carphone Warehouse’s group finance team. By
using Hyperion’s software, Carphone Warehouse intends to
improve its financial close and reporting process and reduce
internal control risk. Carphone Warehouse finance personnel
should be able to spend less time on processing and more
time on value-added analysis, as well as providing a single
version of the truth to support financial management and
statutory reporting.
“Hyperion Financial Management will give us a far greater
degree of integrity and will help us significantly improve
our approach to reporting at both a group level and business
unit level,” says Langstaff.
The final component of Carphone Warehouse’s purchase is the
Hyperion Master Data Management (MDM) Server. Using the
Hyperion MDM Server, Carphone Warehouse finance personnel
can be directly involved in the iterative process of
managing complex, rapidly changing Business Performance
Management master data, rather than having IT manage this
for them. Hyperion MDM Server synchronizes master data
across analytic applications, data warehouses, transaction
systems and Business Performance Management applications.
Hyperion MDM Server integrates with the Hyperion Business
Intelligence Platform.
“The key benefit we expect to gain is a single version of
the truth in terms of financial management, reporting,
planning, budgeting and data management. We believe we will
gain significant process efficiencies at a result of
investing in Hyperion software,” said Langstaff.
**************************************
An increasingly complex business environment is prompting a
growing number of companies to adopt a new approach for the
enterprise planning process, according to Hyperion. The
approach combines strategic, financial and operational
planning into a single, integrated process and relies on a
suite of packaged software applications. Enterprise planning
helps ensure broader and more collaborative planning and
forecasting, that more discipline is provided for strategic
modeling, and that operations are linked directly with
strategic goals.
“Planning must go beyond traditional budgeting and
forecasting to help companies address the complexities of
the global marketplace,” said Rich Clayton, vice president
of product marketing at Hyperion. “The long range plan
should feed the annual operating plan. Changes in the
operating plan will have impact on cash flow and funding
strategies. Updated plans and forecasts are used to perform
what if and ad hoc analyses. Customers are increasingly
buying our packaged applications in combination to deploy an
enterprise planning solution that addresses these
complexities and allows them to link strategies with goals,
plans and resources.”
Clayton said customers are integrating Hyperion Planning,
Hyperion Strategic Finance, Hyperion Workforce Planning, in
combination with the Hyperion Business Intelligence
Platform, for their enterprise planning needs. He noted that
Hyperion is the only software company offering the
combination of applications for a true enterprise planning
solution, marketed as Enterprise Planning by Hyperion.
Leading Global Companies Adopting Enterprise Planning for
Critical Business Decisions
Zebra Technologies Corporation, a global leader in
delivering on-demand printing solutions for business
improvement, will use a combination of Hyperion Strategic
Finance and Hyperion Planning to link its strategy, planning
and reporting processes for improved financial planning.
“Using Hyperion Strategic Finance, we have been able to
analyze the impact of potential mergers and acquisitions,
improve our financial modeling and obtain faster scenario
analysis,” said Todd Naughton, vice president and controller
at Zebra. “Now we are adding Hyperion Planning and Hyperion
Workforce Planning to improve our financial and operational
planning processes. The integrated solution will further
help us to translate strategic objectives into operational
goals and targets.”
Another customer relying on Hyperion software for enterprise
planning is Denny’s. The largest full-service family
restaurant chain in America, Denny’s uses key elements of
the Hyperion Enterprise Planning solution to improve
efficiency in operational planning activities with critical
strategic planning functions. “We are using Hyperion
Strategic Finance and Hyperion Planning across our
organization in support of building our annual plans, long
range plans as well as our forecasts,” said Robert Verostek,
manager of corporate accounting at Denny’s. “Hyperion
software saves us time in data collection which is used for
additional analysis that helps us make better strategic
business decisions and improve performance across the
company.”
A third enterprise planning customer, EMCOR, a global leader
in mechanical and electrical construction, energy
infrastructure and facilities services, is using Hyperion
software to monitor business drivers, so that the company
can identify issues early and quickly react to changes in
the business. “Hyperion Strategic Finance and Hyperion
Planning are essential elements of our planning solution.
With them, we can involve all areas of our business in
collaborative planning based on reliable data that is shared
on a real-time basis,” said William Feher, controller at
EMCOR. “The Hyperion solution has made it possible for us to
operate in an interactive, integrated way to make critical
management decisions with speed and confidence.”
Enterprise Planning to Help Drive Strong Growth in BPM
Analytic Applications
The increasing adoption of enterprise planning solutions is
part of a market trend in which organizations look to BPM
vendors to improve planning and budgeting processes. In its
June 2005 report, “IDC Market Analysis: Worldwide Business
Performance Management and Financial Analytic Applications
2005-2009 Forecast and 2004 Vendor Share,” research firm IDC
says the market for financial/BPM applications grew at a
rate of 15.5% in 2004. The report points to planning and
budgeting applications, accounting for 42.8% of the market,
as the primary drivers of growth. Ranked the number one
vendor in worldwide Business Performance Management and
Financial Applications market by IDC, Hyperion is
strategically positioned to take the lead in Enterprise
Planning.
“In this high-growth market, budgeting and planning
applications will play a key role,” said Kathleen Wilhide,
Director, Compliance and Business Performance Management
Solutions at IDC. “Dynamic performance management can be
achieved through integrated planning, budgeting and
scorecarding initiatives supported by technology to ensure
consistent processes and reliable information. Companies
with integrated enterprise planning solutions will see
significant traction in customer adoption in the BPM
applications market.”
Planning Solution Drives Superior Business Performance
Several factors set Hyperion’s suite of packaged financial
applications apart from other offerings in the marketplace.
Of primary importance are the capabilities within Hyperion
Strategic Finance for modeling long range plans, treasury
strategies and corporate development activities. Hyperion
Strategic Finance is unique in the marketplace in ensuring
treasurers the capability to analyze how business decisions,
such as stock buy-back programs or changes in credit rating,
might impact cash flow. Additionally, as companies demand
more rigorous analysis before committing to an acquisition,
divestiture or investment, they increasingly turn to
Hyperion Strategic Finance for the most up-to-date actual
results and forecasts to model different scenarios, test
assumptions and see the incremental impact on financial
statements.
Hyperion Workforce Planning, a specialized module in the
Hyperion Planning application, is designed to make
headcount, salary and compensation planning fast and
efficient across the organization. This special-purpose
planning software allows companies, who currently rely on
broken or disparate spreadsheets, to plan, monitor and
analyze the workforce and associated costs down to the
operational level of a business, and see the potential
impact on the financial statements.
**************************************
Global Hyatt Corporation is using Hyperion software to
streamline its worldwide planning and financial reporting
processes.
Global Hyatt Corporation and its subsidiaries operate,
manage or franchise hotels and resorts in 45 countries. With
such widespread global operations, the company needed
superior financial consolidation and planning tools.
“We looked at the major consolidation tools used by the
Fortune 100 companies and we saw that the great majority of
those companies use Hyperion,” said Tom O’Toole, senior vice
president, strategy and systems for Global Hyatt
Corporation. “After an extensive RFP process which resulted
in Hyperion emerging as the leader and the additional fact
that we had successfully used Hyperion software in other
parts of our company in the past, we were reassured we were
making the right selection.”
The need for new planning and consolidation software was
driven by the formation of an umbrella holding company that
encompassed two Hyatt entities, Hyatt Hotels Corporation and
Hyatt International Corporation and other hospitality
businesses. With the new global organization in place, the
corporation needed to consolidate information from each
entity into a single operational overview. To enable that
consolidation, Hyatt is using Hyperion Financial Management,
a comprehensive, Web-based application that delivers global
collection, financial consolidation, reporting and analysis
in a single, highly scalable solution.
The automated Hyperion solution replaces the old manual
consolidation process, which involved using Excel
spreadsheets to accumulate financial performance and
operating results from each company and merging the data
into a single view.
Hyperion Financial Management has enabled the company to
reduce the time it takes to consolidate results from its
entire hotel operations and corporate subsidiaries from 15
days to two days. This means that the company is within its
goal of being able to provide quarterly corporate reports
and quarterly results within 30 days after month end, a
dramatic improvement from the previous 60 to 75 days.
Hyatt also needed to reduce the time required in its
planning process. The Hyperion Planning software provides a
collaborative, integrated, event-based planning solution
that works throughout the enterprise to track and monitor
business plans and forecasts across the organization. The
result of the Hyperion Planning implementation has been that
the planning cycle has been reduced from three to five
months to six to eight weeks. The company currently has
approximately 400 users of Hyperion Planning and plans to
have 3,000 users in the future, when it extends the use of
the software beyond Finance to other operations within the
organization.
Because they provide automation to replace the manual
activities required prior to the implementation, the
solutions have had the added benefit of standardizing charts
of accounts across companies and improving compliance
processes as well.
Hyatt is now entering the second phase of its
implementation, in which it will begin using additional
Business Performance Management software to make
non-financial metrics accessible to Global Hyatt management,
with the eventual goal of incorporating that information,
along with financial results, into scorecards for compliance
reporting.
“With the complex operations of its global enterprise, Hyatt
faced a real challenge in financial consolidation and
planning,” said Rich Clayton, vice president of product
marketing at Hyperion. “Now, with improved financial
planning and consolidation processes in place and the
integration of the business and finance management cycles
underway, Hyatt will be able to ensure that the
decision-making within the whole organization is aligned
with its strategic goals.”
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