Johannesburg, 01 Jul 2008
The Chemical Services Group (Chemserve), the largest specialty chemicals organisation in southern Africa, is realising the benefits of improved management and access to group financial information following the implementation of a customised, automated financial reporting solution deployed by South African-based focused business intelligence and data management solutions provider, ASYST Intelligence (ASYST).
The implementation, which took less than nine months to complete, was split into two phases and included the customisation and deployment of the solution, as well as staff training.
According to Paul Morgan, MD of ASYST, Chemserve, which comprises 20 autonomous business units, wanted to consolidate all its financial information in an automated reporting solution to streamline management of, and improve access to, group financial information. The objective was to facilitate faster, more informed business decision-making and alleviate the burden on employees who spent long hours generating reports.
Given the diversity of the business units and the geographical spread of the operations in South Africa and abroad, this required a powerful, customised solution that could deliver on the group's requirements.
ASYST believes that every BI deployment is unique and as consultants, the company models individual solutions to its customers' environments. "This requires you to be flexible and innovative during design and development," explains Woudre van Zyl, Project Lead for ASYST. "Our goal is to maximise the effectiveness of a BI solution, whatever the challenges, while still supporting the current business processes and objectives."
In doing this for Chemserve, the ASYST team did a comprehensive analysis of the reports already in place and worked closely with the client to understand the business and its unique reporting requirements. Once this due diligence was complete, the team was in a position to advise on the most appropriate solutions and begin mapping the implementation.
Phase one involved the development of the management pack of 40 reports, using Crystal reports XI R2. Business Objects XI R2 was also implemented to house and schedule reports from a central repository. A mapping structure was also devised to facilitate the automated updating of reports.
Phase two involved the development of phased reporting, which included the consolidation of rolling 36 months worth of information and reports from the various business units into a single income statement, balance sheet and graphs. Data warehousing was done with Star Schema Dimensional modelling based on Ralph Kimball's methodologies. Using SQL 2000 Data Transformation Services (DTS), ASYST scheduled the automatic extraction, loading and manipulation of data to generate the necessary reports.
While implementing and testing the new reporting solution, data irregularities were highlighted, which could then be corrected by the users. In order to understand where the irregularities arose, Chemserve ran both old and the new solutions parallel for a few months. Chemserve has since switched off the old systems and is now solely using ASYST's management reporting system.
"We regard skills and knowledge transfer as an important ingredient in the roll-out of a solution. Ultimately, the success of any solution depends on the ability of the end-user to exploit it to its full potential. As such, the finance staff at Chemserve have all been trained on the solution and how it works, and they are now able to prepare their own new reports and fix problems as they arise," explains Morgan.
"The business was clear on its objectives and supported the project from the start. With buy-in at every level of the business, we were able to address challenges that arose without the delays that typically come when the different tiers don't buy into a project," says Morgan.
Commenting on the benefits to the business since the implementation of the new reporting solution, Annette Calitz, Management Accountant at Chemserve, says: "The Crystal reporting tools have facilitated the standardising of reports across all business units; reporting parameters can now easily be manipulated to reflect the complex reporting structures within the Chemserve Group. Using Business Objects, our large and complex reports are now scheduled outside of business hours, which minimises the impact on our IT infrastructure.
"Making sure the process went smoothly, our ASYST Project Lead, Woudre van Zyl, was always willing to go the extra mile in assisting with internally developed reports and in explaining the methodology used in their development. This has assisted Chemserve in maintaining and updating existing reports."
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