In a joint client briefing session, Bateleur Walker Financial Systems and Walker reaffirmed their total commitment to local customers. Bateleur, the South African distributor for Walker, provides an exceptional quality support service to Walker customers. The Bateleur Walker team recently underwent extensive training to partner Walker in introducing its new Walker "Smart Financials" to the South African marketplace. During the past four months, Walker has been briefing their clients worldwide about the re-positioning of Walker in line with global business trends. Established more than 28 years ago, Walker, supplier to more than 450 of the global Fortune 1000 companies, is well respected as an industry opinion leader in financials. As a result of extensive research into business financial needs, conducted for Walker by the Gartner Group, Walker has spearheaded the requirement for financial solutions allowing the future finance role to enable management insight at all levels of enterprise. Paul Lord, Managing Director of Walker - UK, remarked "Noting the changes in the marketplace and listening to both customers and industry leaders, has helped us formulate Walker's mission statement, to provide smart financials that fuel business advantage. This is in line with Walker's best-of-breed philosophy. Backing up our commitment to best-of-breed is our channeling of 25% net profit to our Research & Development Division". Martyn Joyce, director of Bateleur Walker Financial Systems, confirms that the South African input from local clients has been important in the development of a number of new products. Walker has always believed in enterprise-wide solutions and is following a careful philosophy of acquisition in each of the enterprise sectors. "The recent acquisition of Revere gives us Immpower, a best-of-breed asset optimisation and maintenance product. Immpower maintenance systems have proved an excellent fit to capital-intensive industrial requirements." Lord states that Immpower, although already used by major players such as BP, will only be launched into the South African market towards the latter part of the year. On Walker Smart Financials "Walker customers want to translate accounting data into business information to help them run their businesses more efficiently. Walker has picked the best-of-breed client/server tools to assist its customers map the accounting data into business information. "Accounting department staff then become business analysts. For example, when you have catalogues on-line and your customers place their orders via the Net, you don't have to do the 'recording' kind of work anymore. What kind of work do you do? Now you have information about how many kinds of things people are buying and at what price, from what suppliers. You can analyse that information and decide where you can save the most money for the company by leveraging the volume. You can bargain with suppliers for a better price if your company is buying large quantities from one source. "New technology is giving management accountants and financial managers a great opportunity to become the controlling point for decision making. Users are able to use the financials to predict the likely outcome of business activities and deliver this actionable information to the people who can act on it. Add to this the corrective, adaptable and scalable nature of Walker Smart Financials, and you are now assured of a high lifetime return on investment. "For example, we don't use the general ledger just as a device to close the books, to summarise debts. We actually use the general ledger as the information structure in which to store all the financial information for our customers to do profit and loss analysis down to very detailed levels. Ryder, one of our customers, can do drill-downs to a P&L per truck and per route, which provides much value to help the executives run their business." In keeping with the global thin-client trend, Walker delivers self-service where a customer can check the status of an order by logging into the system using the Internet. It has Web-enabled its high volume transaction engine on the enterprise server (the mainframe) providing the capability for large companies to offer self-service capabilities to their customers, and for smaller companies to enlarge their user capacities to include suppliers and remote-client transactions. Walker's enterprise service solution product line, Tamaris follows the company's network-centric computing strategy. This has given the mainframe new life as an information rich, central server, providing business tools to each desktop user on the network. Major corporate players have already initiated this thin-client interface, making them well positioned to ride the wave of transaction volume increases. "When a company offers self-service, then the users of the financial applications for accounts payable are no longer just the accountants but other employees of your company and maybe even your customers and your partners," reiterated Lord, "suddenly, you're talking about thousands of users. The number of transactions that are going to hit the financial applications is going to explode in this self-service world. From a technology perspective, the enabler is the Internet/intranet with Web-enabled transaction processing capability." 'For example, on an enabled system, accounts payable becomes procurement through electronic commerce. Accounts receivable is no longer just accounts receivable; the customer can participate in the payments and the collection process. And we can do credit analysis and make the information available. "So we're going up the value chain from accounting to financial solutions, and that is where the finance department wants to be. That's where it needs to be.
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