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| Case Study |
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Financial Data Warehouse helps large
manufacturer improve decision making capability
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By consolidating finance information from multiple manufacturing and service centers into a single data
warehouse, Patni helped a large manufacturer enable cross-functional business reporting in its finance
division.
The Client
The client is one of the world's largest manufacturers of complex engineering products.
The Challenge
The client had a presence consisting of several manufacturing and servicing
centers across the globe. Each location had its own finance division with a set
of supporting applications. The finance function was supported by a landscape
consisting of Oracle Financials, SAP, legacy and mainframe based applications.
As these applications were hosted on different platforms, and had different
database structures, there was no standard way to access and consolidate
data. As a result, the client required substantial efforts and resources to
collate financial data and generate cross functional reports across cost, sales,
accounts payable and receivables functions. This was a serious impediment in
a highly competitive world, where lack of a single view prevented effective
decision making.
To address this issue, the client decided to consolidate all its disparate data
resources into a central data warehouse with the following objectives:
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Integrate all the finance functions such as sales, costing and accounting for
organizational hierarchical reporting and analysis |
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Enhance customer contract analysis to increase fixed price profitability |
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Reduce turn-around time for cost rate adjustments |
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Enable quick aging analysis, tracking and recovery of receivables, budgeted
v/s actual expenses variance analysis. |
The Solution
Patni understood the client's business objectives and project goals and assisted the latter to
create a detailed roadmap for achieving the stated goals. This was followed by a requirements
assessment, creation of AS-IS process maps, undertaking a gap analysis exercise and
recommendation of TO-BE process maps.
Patni used its Business Intelligence roadmap based on IIDM (Interactive and Iterative
methodology) to develop the Finance data warehouse consisting of business process oriented
data marts viz. shop cost, sales cost, account payable and account receivable. Business
requirements were gathered and prioritized based on the benefits and immediate feasibility
of implementation by adopting Six Sigma methodologies. Subsequently, data integrity issues
were identified, data elements were defined, and multiple BI tools were standardized.
Security was implemented using the RBAC model and integrated with the organization's LDAP
for the data marts. The data warehouse was based on Ralph Kimball's Bus architecture.
Individual data marts were built for different finance functions and a common link was
established using Conformed Dimensions. Informatica was used as the ETL tool, and Cognos as
the reporting tool.
The Technology
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Tools
- ETL: Informatica -
PowerCenter 5.1
- Presentation: Cognos 6.6 - Impromptu, PowerPlay and Visualizer
- Data Modeling:Erwin 3.5.2
- Scheduler: AppWorx,
CA-7 |
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Server: Sun Solaris, IBM - Mainframe |
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Database: Oracle 8.1.7,
DB2 |
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The Benefits
By consolidating multiple data sources into a single data warehouse,
the client achieved the following benefits:
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Faster decision making ability due to 50% reduction in time spent in
analyzing and accessing finance data from its global sources |
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Reduction in reporting cycle time by one week |
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Direct savings through reduced operating and employee efforts |
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Cross-functional business reporting across multiple data marts with
facility to drill down to the lowest granular level. |
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