The Jefferson-Pilot Corporation has increased the amount of time available to analyse its business performance ten-fold, from 5% to 50%, thanks to its implementation of Walker Horizon Financial Consolidation, a "Smart Financials" solution from Walker. Walker Smart Financials comprise several suites of financial applications that incorporate analytic solutions and best practices, delivering an essential extra layer of management insight that allows managers to make fast, astute strategic decisions. The company specialises in the development, implementation and support of Financial Software for both UNIX & NT, Client/Server and mainframe platforms. Walker, a year 2000 compliant company since 1996, has over 550 customers worldwide, including over 450 of the Fortune 1000 and is represented in South Africa by Bateleur Walker Financial Systems. Walker has now merged the boundary between data warehousing and financials, linking business goals to operational processes. The advantage Walker customers get is management insight - timely, actionable information delivered directly to the managers who can act on it. While the majority of companies look to decrease the time spent analysing their business and performance, US-based Jefferson-Pilot Corporation specifically wanted to increase the time spent analysing its business to facilitate its transition to a "value-adding" organisation. The company can best be described a finance corporation undergoing exceptional growth. It owns one of the USA`s largest shareholder-owned life insurance companies; owns and operates three network television stations and 17 radio stations, and produces and syndicates sports programmes. Jefferson-Pilot faced several key challenges in supporting this growth and needed to get its financial data into the hands of the business units decision-makers for planning and analysis. Further, the company needed to focus on providing timely performance measures, not just historical financial reports. Its over-riding goal was to become `proactive performance managers` rather than `reactive transaction processors.` A key component of this strategy was to find a software solution with an open and integrated analytic repository, drill-down capabilities and "what-if" reporting features. It therefore selected the Walker Horizon Financial Consolidation solution, based on the Arbor Essbase OLAP server, to be the foundation for their Financial Information Management Systems and for their newly launched Cost Information Delivery System. Together, these systems serve as the cornerstone for its enterprise performance information system. According to Bateleur`s Martyn Joyce, the power of Horizon`s analytical application, combined with the Arbor Essbase server, provides Jefferson-Pilot with the ability to change its role from a transaction-oriented organisation to one that can drive and manage business performance. With Horizon Financial Consolidation, the finance function now efficiently meets the needs of the organisation as value-added `proactive performance managers`, he said. "Walker tells us that, with the Horizon Financial Consolidation solution, the company has achieved a new level of control over information and improved its business processes," said Joyce. "Data is immediately available to analyse company metrics such as key performance indicators. Robust OLAP functionality allow drill-down capabilities to view business and financial data from multiple perspectives. Horizon provides comprehensive financial consolidation management utilising open OLAP functionality for powerful performance management "In addition, the need for separate copies of data has been eliminated, allowing information from different sources to be consolidated while maintaining data integrity. And, as the business grows, acquired organisations can be easily and quickly integrated into the financial consolidation and performance reporting process. "Jefferson-Pilot has realised many benefits as a result of the Horizon Financial Consolidation implementation. They now have improved control over both the accruals and consolidation adjustment entries and can get quick access to the status of those entries. "Financial personnel have the ability to track bottom-line changes quickly as adjustments are made. Final adjustments now take hours rather than days and the quarterly closing cycle has been drastically reduced. "These performance improvements have dramatically cut the time needed to process transaction-based activities and freed up sufficient time to allow Jefferson-Pilot`s managers and directors to analyse the company`s performance and plan its path for the future," he said. A number of corporates in South Africa are enjoying the benefits of Walker Smart Financials, eg. Telkom, Sanlam, Woolworths and Sasol.
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