Creating a World View:
Global Financial Analysis

Client:
World leader in high-performance polymers


Business Challenges:
To present executives with a comprehensive, integrated, and meaningful view of order and invoicing information gathered from ten regional headquarters and thus all their satellite offices worldwide

To facilitate communications and business processes across those regions by defining and automating the use of a common set business concepts


Technology Challenges:
To integrate order and invoice data in Oracle on UNIX, using Business Objects to deliver the resulting information to PC desktops

To present system status information to managers via web browsers, using Microsoft IIS server at multiple offices around the world


Solution:
Creative Data built a pioneering solution that integrates and rolls up data from many offices into a global picture of current operations, for all product lines, across multiple business units. This large data mart performs 300+ production tasks daily. It generates analytics derived from data about every sales and orders at every site across the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific. Unlike previous attempts to create this solution, the Creative Data project satisfied executives’ demands for performance, flexibility, timeliness, and breadth.


Benefits:
• Established shared definitions for orders, customers, and other business
• concepts. This global language gave all divisions a common, approved way
• to talk to the corporate office about business. It also enabled departments
• to use the same methods to capture and analyze the data they feed into
• the system.
• Replaced and automated a previously convoluted, protracted process.
• Before the system went online,each division used to hand-build and
• massage its own data to generate hardcopy reports in a tedious and slow
• procedure that invited inaccuracy. Now, the system offers highly integrated,
• up-to-the-minute visibility into global sales and orders.
• Enables executives to analyze sales using the online system to drill down to
• the necessary level of detail
• Supports the discovery of trends and perspectives because – unlike the
• paper-based reports -- the system maintains historical information on all
• sales and order activity
• Permits divisions to operate independently without impeding global
• communications and integration

EXTRA!
Because the results of this solution feed into leading economic indicators, it is imperative that the system maintain the integrity of its data. To ensure accuracy, the solution monitors its own health and facilitates management by displaying the status of all processes -- by day and over time -- on a web-browser-based dashboard.



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