The Bank Boston Corporation, one of the US`s largest banking groups, is using Arbor Essbase to gain an overall view of its business. Something about Boston seems to encourage revolutionary activities, and the Bank Boston Corporation is carrying on the tradition. Founded in 1784, BankBoston Corporation is one of the oldest chartered banks in the US and one of the first to participate in the global economy - starting in 1917! As a super-regional holding company with eight banking subsidiaries and the third largest network of international offices of any US bank, BankBoston Corporation assets total $40,6bn. The bank has now entered another revolution - the client/server computing revolution. It is running various networks based on NetWare, LAN Manage, and Banyan Vines. But with 15 business units and more than 19 000 staff members distributed around the world, budget development and management became increasingly complex. The Finance & Control group needed a way to track budgets for all units. It found it in the Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server from Arbor Software. Getting a bird`s-eye viewBob Geremia is senior manager for performance reporting, and his organisation is responsible for the corporation`s annual budgeting and monthly reporting. "Our budgeting task was large and cumbersome," he explains. "Preliminary analysis was performed on 3 000 separate spreadsheets - each containing several hundred line items and covering 17 time periods (12 months, four quarters, and year to date). Once the data was prepared on individual spreadsheets, it was then sent to our mainframe for processing. The problem was, each analyst could only view his individual spreadsheets - he couldn`t see everything rolled up. If you wanted to see totals, you had to manually add them up or develop specialised macros." The group needed a way to view the complete organisational budget structure so that they could analyse how well each business unit met its targets. For example, did the real estate unit meet its targets for salaries? Were budgets for loans on target? Besides having a bird`s-eye view of all data, the group also needed faster processing response and greater flexibility in viewing data on an ad hoc basis. Before Essbase, 3 000 individual spreadsheets were iterated and then sent to the mainframe for allocations. Consolidated results were produced only after all allocations were made - the complete process for a single run requiring 18 hours. Bank analysts couldn`t easily track each business unit`s budget performance before the mainframe process, and the length of time required to produce a report resulted in consolidations being run only once every few weeks. Essbase made it possible to view business unit performance on a daily basis. Gaining speed, flexibility and quality "When we first saw Essbase in action, its benefits were obvious," says Geremia. "The drilldown capability was especially important to us because for the first time, we could view the underlying levels of detail. Once our analysts saw that, they wanted it! "Essbase also allowed us to create interim ad hoc reports from our desktops without having to use expensive, time-consuming mainframe resources. Finally, we could also view all corporate data - before allocations were made and without having to manually add subtotals in order to find out how a business unit was really doing. Essbase was a giant boost in productivity for us." Getting their first Essbase application up to speed was easier than expected, according to Brian Garvey, Business Systems Consultant. "Our first Essbase application is known at the Bank as the Budget Consolidation Tool (BCT). It easily consolidates data from all of the individual spreadsheets," he says. "Our budgeting model contains 5 400 members. Essbase was used with the finance network we had in place. Migrating data from our legacy systems was easy because the Essbase data model adapted easily to support our mainframe`s data extract format. In fact, Essbase did everything we wanted it to do - which surprised us!" Before Essbase, analysts could only view portions of corporate data. Without being able to see data in context with other factors, its real significance was obscured. Now with BCT, data can be viewed in three dimensions simultaneously - time, hierarchy, and accounts - so scenarios can be compared. 1 500 accounts are consolidated through 800 roll-up points in the hierarchy to provide corporate totals. As one example, factoring loans, mortgage loans, base rate loans, and other loans roll up to total loans, giving management reporting staff a way to check intermediate subtotals and closely track business unit budgets. Now, all preliminary budget iterations are performed on BCT in two hours and sent to the mainframe for final processing. According to Geremia, so far in 1994, they`ve only required half the number of mainframe runs they normally would have done. "We`ve saved up to 50% on mainframe processing time," he says, "and we estimate our payback period to be less than two years based on mainframe charges alone." Most of the 50 employees who use the BCT application were already spreadsheet-proficient. They were up and running almost immediately on Essbase because they didn`t have to learn a new interface - Essbase is accessed directly from their familiar Excel or Lotus spreadsheet. All analysts in the Management Reporting department have desktop access to Essbase. In addition, six PCs running Excel are available to other employees who need to access BCT. Bank employees located around the world load data into Excel or Lotus spreadsheets and create print files via macros, and these are sent to corporate headquarters via cc:Mail. Headquarters then loads this directly into the BCT application using the Essbase "drag-and-drop" feature or in standardised file formats. Essbase is easy to live with Saving time, reducing iterations, and doing it all with virtually no training required gave the bank a tremendous increase in productivity. And not only are they accomplishing more in less time, but they`re also able to view and analyse data in ways that were previously impossible. Not only did Essbase deliver the capabilities BankBoston wanted, but minimal training and ongoing support requirements make it easy to live with as well. "Our ongoing support is managed by two people," says Garvey. "I come from a financial/PC background and the other person comes from a mainframe background and we found administering Essbase was not difficult." What`s next? How will Essbase affect analysis in other areas of the bank? "We have two projects under consideration," says Geremia. "The first is expanding our BCT budgeting application using the Essbase application programming interface (API) with Visual Basic to create a custom front-end. This will enable members of upper management and other employees not familiar with spreadsheets to access specific data which they currently can`t view and easily generate custom reports." Secondly, Essbase is being considered as a critical component of a new MIS that will facilitate indepth analysis and provide access to data residing elsewhere in the corporation. Product data, customer data, and customer credit information would be incorporated, enabling profitability analyses and better forecasting. Essbase offers the capability to provide forecasts accompanied by underlying data. BankBoston`s Budget Consolidation Tool application fired a first shot in its data consolidation and analysis revolution. And BankBoston is finding Essbase to be so powerful and flexible that it won`t be the last. Arbor Essbase is distributed in South Africa by The IBD Group.
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