CUSTOMER SOLUTION BRIEF

International Career Site Company/Essbase Project

Overview

Oracle Essbase is an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Server that provides an

environment for deploying pre-packaged applications or developing custom analytic

and enterprise performance management applications. With a rapid application

development environment, Oracle Essbase enables business users to quickly

model complex business scenarios. Aside from its high scalability, a key strength

of Oracle Essbase lies in its ability to allow users to “write back” to an application’s

data repository under security. This makes it ideal for developing forward-looking

applications such as forecasting, scenario modeling, and “what if” type analysis.

With its outstanding Microsoft Office integration, Oracle Essbase resonates with

both business and financial analysts. In addition, its suite of reporting tools satisfies

the diverse needs of users across the enterprise. Whether it’s inside a spreadsheet,

through formatted reports, via a powerful ad hoc graphical interface, or a data

visualization paradigm, business users can easily and intuitively understand vital

business drivers.

Oracle Essbase Studio is a single environment to simplify the construction and

administration of Essbase applications. Essbase Studio provides a single interface for

performing tasks related to data modeling, cube design, and construction of analytic

applications. Essbase Studio provides a consistent platform for building outlines and

loading data by consolidating cube construction activities into one interface. With

a wizard-driven user interface, Essbase Studio provides an easy-to-use graphical

modeling environment.

This International Career Site Company is a leading provider of specialized career

Websites and career fairs for select professional communities. Like most organizations

in today’s environment it was crucial for the company to be able to meet their

complex and ever changing reporting requirements, while at the same time lowering

the cost of compliance. They needed a solution that would deliver quality financial

data providing increased governance, visibility, and transparency into the financial

close and reporting cycle to enable management to be confident in the numbers they

report to stakeholders.

The company was looking for a tool that would help their financial analysis and

reporting teams quickly understand the metrics that influence business performance

and allow them to automate their manual year-end processes and monthly

forecasting.

TechnologyStack:Essbase 11.1.2.1Essbase Studio 11.1.2.1Shared Services 11.1.2.1Smart View Excel Add-In 11.1.2.1.103

zirous®

Challenges

The company needed a tool that would improve planning, productivity and deliver a single

source of truth for business critical information. They wanted to achieve greater visibility

into company performance and cut their report processing time exponentially. To do this

they needed to address the following challenges:

• Reportinghierarchyforaccounts/entitiesexistedonlyinexcelspreadsheets.

• ComplexcalculationsdoneinExcelwerehardtomaintainandinherentlyerror-

prone.

• Thesecurityprocesswascomplicatedtoimplementandhardtomaintainsoitwas

often oversimplified.

• Planningisdoneglobally,acrossmultiple,internationaltimezones.

Solution Details

Zirous architected a solution leveraging the key features of Essbase and Essbase

Studio. Essbase Studio provided a multi-dimensional data modeling solution to supply

the Essbase cube with data from the Data Warehouse. Essbase replaced standalone,

spreadsheet-based tools used by the company with a single platform to centralize financial

and management reporting. Implementing an Essbase solution provided the following

advantages to the company:

• Centralized,sharedhierarchy

• Formulaconsistency

• Simpleyetflexiblesecurityapproach

• Theabilitytosupportaglobalplanningandbudgetingprocess.

A Centralized Shared Hierarchy: Centralizing financial reports helped the company to

alleviate redundancy and errors. The security model also allows for regional segregation

of the data at an internal company level instead of an all-or-nothing, locked spreadsheet

approach.

Centralized Calculations: By putting the calculations in Essbase instead of individual excel

files, everyone in the organization gets the same answer. And changes to calculations are

automatically displayed in reports and ad-hoc queries.

Currency conversion done in Essbase: Previously, currency conversion was done

manually in a set of excel spreadsheets which lead to inaccuracies and time consuming,

manual intervention. Now the currency conversion is done in Essbase so that rates are

applied consistently and are available immediately at retrieval times. This also allows

for multiple exchange rate conversion scenarios allowing for projections to be done in

seconds versus days.

zirous®

zirous®

Locations: West Des Moines, IA

Minneapolis, MN Portland, OR

www.zirous.com

Increased Efficiency and Global User Support: The company was able to reduce their

financial close staff by one full-time employee while maintaining the same month-

end close cycle time. Essbase also enabled the company to view mid-month progress

reports by generating data loads three times a day from the General Ledger and planning

systems instead of once monthly, allowing changes to be reflected twice daily in each of

the three affected time zones.

Quick User Adoption: Users were trained in a matter of weeks and are now able to

produce their own custom reports – regardless of their prior knowledge of the system.

zirous®

zirous®

Locations: West Des Moines, IA

Minneapolis, MN Portland, OR

www.zirous.com

Financial Analysts

ORACLEEssbase

ORACLE Essbase Studio

Planning Applications General Ledger

The DataWarehouse