BoE Ltd has consolidated its 1998 acquisitions through the licensing of Hyperion Enterprise from Global Technology Business Intelligence in a deal worth more than R1 million. As a direct consequence, BoE has freed up the time of more than 17 executives and staff from the mundane task of reporting and allowed key management to focus on analysis of core business data.
BoE is South Africa`s sixth largest bank and financial services grouping, employing 6 800 people, with market capitalisation of R12,3 billion and bottom line of R1,5 billion in fiscal 1998 before minority interests. Minority interests were bought by BoE in August 1998.
"We have an extremely complex structure because of the diversity of our businesses," says Don Bowden, GM Group Finance. "Despite this we have to pull all figures together and report properly and holistically to the directors on anything that has a groupwide impact. And it must be consistent across subsidiary organisations."
Complicating the issue was BoE`s disparate range of systems through its acquisitions. Boland PKS operates on a mainframe with systems written inhouse using Mappa for its general ledger. NBS, BoE Corporate and BoE Merchant Bank operate on Digital Alpha servers running Dodge software for their general ledgers. Some smaller subsidiaries use Accpac, and the rest of BoE operates on JD EdwardsOneWorld on an AS/400 for general ledger purposes.
Adding further complexity was the spread of geographical locations, the five general ledgers run by the group, the cross-shareholdings between group organisations, and the different reporting formats of the companies.
"Consolidating all this took weeks and an enormous amount of data rekeying, and then all we had done was aggregate the data, without adding any value. This had to be done each month, and then again with each acquisition, when we had to run what-if consolidations," says Bowden. "There had to be a better way and Hyperion was it." Bowden and AGM Group Finance Johan Human championed the purchase of Hyperion and within weeks it was in use.
"The learning curve is very short," says Human. "We acquired Hyperion just four weeks before yearend and used it to consolidate yearend at head-office level."
BoE has easily mapped its disparate data sources to Hyperion at BoE head office, BoE Asset Management and Boland PKS and will soon roll it out at the rest of BoE Bank. "We have to consolidate for management in one way, and for statutory reporting in another way," says Bowden. "Hyperion does them both. We now have flexible reporting, with data captured at source, and will soon have financial managers freed up to analyse figures and give the business meaningful information."
Hyperion will now become BoE`s major management reporting tool, with board members from Bill McAdam down being provided with online viewing of vital data.
"All executive board members and senior managers are comfortable with online viewing of information," says Bowden. "For ease of use we will be setting up intranet reporting using Hyperion`s Spider-Man Web Delivery programme for the reporting of management information via Web browsers."
Of equal importance to BoE, in the light of McAdam`s stated goal to grow the groups` international business, is the fact that Hyperion supports cross-currency consolidation.
Bowden says the group will next look to obtain other statistics on the business by incorporating other data, such as new business inflows, average margins, revenue by employees, return on capital, return on assets, employment equity statistics and off-balance sheet data such as assets under administration. "There`s a lot of peripheral data we will bring in and make easily and readily available for monthly viewing."
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