Johannesburg, 23 Jan 2002
The finance division of pay television service, MultiChoice Africa, has reduced its balance sheet report generation time by more than 70% since upgrading its Geac SmartStream enterprise business application system to version 6.5.
"The analytical cubes we run contain a huge amount of data, including the past two years` figures, forecasts, budgets and more," says Carol Reed, financial systems manager at MultiChoice. "In spite of this huge data load, the time taken to draw balance sheets has been cut from 25 minutes to seven," she says.
Supplied by ERP and supply chain management system specialist, Comparex Africa Mainstream, SmartStream 6.5 was installed at MultiChoice in mid-November.
In addition, SmartStream 6.5 has allowed MultiChoice to reduce the number of support personnel while dramatically increasing the number of users. "In 1995, we had 50 users who were supported by eight technical staff," says Reed. "Now, with SmartStream 6.5, we have 300 users who are supported by only five technical support staff."
Another advantage of SmartStream 6.5, adds Reed, is its ability to support a wide range of advanced software which MultiChoice has acquired. "MultiChoice serves subscribers in over 50 countries with satellite television programming," says Reed. "The resultant ever-increasing demands being placed on our internal processes has meant that we have to keep up with the latest developments in software in order to boost administrative performance," she says.
"This latest version of SmartStream supports all our new software acquisitions such as Windows 2000 Terminal Server, Office 2000, Sybase 12 and Citrix Metaframe XP."
MultiChoice has been a SmartStream user since 1994, beginning with version three, which allowed the TV company to move from a Windows desktop environment to a Citrix terminal server environment.
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