Stannic, one of South Africa's leading asset finance organisations, has implemented a sophisticated management information system to meet demands for more detailed and timeous information.
"The flexibility and power of our new tool is very impressive and once fully developed will provide Stannic business users with critical information to support tactical thinking, as well as current information on performance at all levels," says Dave Brown, managing director of Stannic.
Stannic's new management information system (MIS), is being rolled out by Dimension Data Group company SPL and is based on Comshare's Decision Web application on a Hyperion Essbase database. It can cope with complex calculations and allows for data capture and data validation, as well as flexible reporting. "Forecasting in a client server and/or web environment are possible and the system can be easily accessed and maintained," says Brown.
The MIS provides Stannic's channels with weekly and monthly new business statistics, as well as cost and income information. "New business weekly and monthly deals, per sales person, are e-mailed to the business unit managers," says Brown. "Monthly new business summary reports are also e-mailed to managers, accountants and business unit managers."
In addition, the MIS will provide Stannic staff with multidimensional views of new business over the current and previous year - by channel and centre, by product, rate type, consultant, ace band and goods type. Budgets, actuals and consultant targets, with variances, will also be available to head office, the channel and unit managers.
The management information system offers a complete guided analysis to help Stannic identify problem areas and place them in the right business context.
The new system requires no software to be installed on client PCs. The only requirement is an Internet browser, Microsoft Excel and e-mail, which Stannic already has. "This is a great enhancement from the download problems experienced on our legacy system," says Brown.
Stannic had to change its management information system to meet the changing structure of the company with an increasing number of consultants working from home. Download problems were being experienced as the organisation's legacy system's database resided on the mainframe and data was downloaded to individual PCs on a daily basis.
In addition, the mainframe technology did not integrate easily with certain spreadsheet applications, which meant flexible and specialised data capture and reporting was difficult.
From a skills perspective, as Stannic's legacy system was no longer supported and developed, it was proving expensive and difficult to find the right skills - one of the key reasons for re-developing on more current technology.
Decision Web on Essbase, distributed by Comshare, enables Stannic to extend their analysis of management information through sophisticated attribute analysis.
Brown says Essbase's powerful speed of calculation is envisaged to overcome the downtime problems of the past. "It also offers room for more dimensions with which to 'slice and dice' than our legacy system," he says.
Stannic's MIS will be in production in time for the company's budget cycle next year.
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Stannic
Stannic, the asset finance division of the Standard Bank Group, provides finance for passenger vehicles; leisure goods such as 4 x 4's, boats and caravans; commercial vehicles and capital equipment, such as tractors, machine tools, computer and medical equipment, and helicopters.
Dimension Data & SPL:
Dimension Data Holdings Limited is a global Information Technology Integration corporation based in Sandton, South Africa. The company which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, has a turnover of approximately US$1.5 billion. The Group has representation on five continents and operates out of 36 countries. The Group has achieved a compound annual growth rate of 98% in turnover and 57% in headline earnings per share over the past 5 years. The Group is focussed on communications/ networking infrastructure and electronic commerce software applications, two of the highest growth sectors of the information economy.
SPL, part of the Dimension Data Group, has long been recognised as a high value IT partner to South African corporations and government. The company focuses on customer management, information management and enterprise systems.
Comshare
Comshare is a leading provider of financial applications for management planning and control, including financial consolidation and reporting, enterprise budgeting, and performance measurement. These complete client/server and Web-based analytic applications are based on an open architecture, utilising market-leading databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Arbor Essbase. Comshare's applications incorporate innovative data visualization and Guided Analysis capabilities designed to improve decision-making for enhanced competitiveness and improved profitability.
A strong customer orientation, application expertise, and commitment to the best technologies have made Comshare one of the top 100 independent software companies, with customers around the world, many of which are Fortune 500 and Financial Times Top 1000 companies. Comshare, Inc. is a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider. For more information, call +27 11 263 5000, e-mail comshare@spl.co.za, or visit Comshare's Web site at http://www.comshare.com/.