Business Objects Customers: Groupama

Groupama

"Consolidating the Group’s financial information is a critical process that requires a stable, powerful and upgradable/scalable environment. By migrating to BusinessObjects XI Release 2, all our applications are now managed on a single platform providing much better performance and security. The migration project was conducted under ideal conditions, with automatic tools such as the Import Wizard available, and also with Business Objects Consulting teams on hand."
Sylvain Duchêne
project manager for finance, decision-making
accounting department of Groupama Group

The Groupama Group's insurance and banking products and services cover more than 8 million people through its two brands, Groupama and Gan.

The Groupama SA holding company controls ten large companies, including Gan Assurance, Gan Eurocourtage, Gan Prévoyance, Gan Patrimoine, Groupama Vie and Groupama Banque, plus about a hundred subsidiaries. The Group's accounting department is currently aiming to improve its financial communication through three strategic projects: Bibop, Item and Frisbi, developed in 2004 and 2005 using BusinessObjects and Data Integrator technologies. Bibop provides the ACAM (the supervisory authority of insurance and mutual benefit companies) with the consolidated status of investments from all the Group's insurance companies. Item integrates information from subsidiaries into the consolidated system. Finally, Frisbi similarly deals with the automation of the IFRS re-evaluation of financial information to ensure conformity with the new standards of the international financial reporting standards.

2006 marked a new project phase: migration of these critical applications from BusinessObjects 6.1 and 6.5 to BusinessObjects XI Release 2. Key objectives for this phase were: standardization of platforms, new functionality, improved scalability, improved performance and a platform for the development of future projects.

Three strategic projects to migrate to a new platform

Before considering further development of its three key projects, Groupama's accounting department decided to standardize its BI (business intelligence) architecture. In fact, Bibop was still running on BusinessObjects 6.1, while Item and Frisbi were already on BusinessObjects 6.5. In addition, each application had its own Web Intelligence server. "With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, we pulled everything apart and started from the beginning with a different logic. Having one architecture per department seemed better adapted for the scalability that we anticipated," explained Sylvain Duchêne, PM for finance, decision-making, accounting department of the Groupama group.

BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is a 100% client/server solution. The migration took place without any real difficulty. "We migrated all our reports from clients, retaining existing functionality. From now on, all our applications are based on the same XI Release 2 platform and server," said Sylvain Duchêne.

All source data is still in flat files, the targets are held in Oracle and the databases and the repository are Oracle and run under Unix.

A new platform with the CMC

Although functionality is the same, there is now a completely new architecture and highly centralized administration. With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, administration is now managed through a single tool, the CMC (central management console). "The centralized administration tools in the CMC offer improved functionality over those within version 6.5," says Philippe Huriaux, MOE manager, banking applications sector, at the Distribution and Management Studies branch of GIE Groupama SI (GSI). "You can see immediately which process is active, with more detailed monitoring, so we can increase performance when needed. The centralized platform is much more powerful. It facilitates the allocation of resources on request; as soon as we are made aware of a demand, we can easily distribute processing on different Windows 2003 servers."

A completely different security logic

Migrating to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 means accessing a radically new level of security. In fact, managing user rights is based on the ACL mode (Access Control Lists), like Windows security, and offers more granular security levels. For example, a resource gives rights to users and groups and stores them in the form of ACL. This resource-oriented approach allows more flexible allocation of rights. A user may have a “creation" right in one universe, but not in another, something that version 6.5 would not allow. "This more flexible security approach is transparent for the user. However, it requires more detailed advanced planning by administrators. With regard to security, the support of the Business Objects Consulting teams was invaluable," Philippe Huriaux emphasized.

New functionality with BusinessObjects XI Release 2

The IT teams had to develop a new application, Radar, which would have been impossible to create without Live Office in BusinessObjects XI Release 2. Radar provides consolidated reporting for the general and financial departments. At the end of each fiscal year, about twenty users retrieve data from a dedicated data mart, format some 200 tables with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, update them two or three times a day and then send them to group management. Live Office integrates perfectly with Microsoft Office tools, and gives users all the transparency and flexibility they need during these very busy reporting periods.

Another new functionality essential to Groupama is synchronization between different universes. "We need to synchronize several universes. For example, we match an Actuals universe with a Forecast universe in order to do variance analyses." These synchronizations are done without any problem on the new platform.

Automatic migration tools

Several migration tools greatly facilitated the migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2. For example, using the Import Wizard, the migration of 800 documents spread over some fifteen universes took only half a day. “For full confidence in results, we developed a tool that can compare an Excel report created under version 6.5 with the same report provided by BusinessObjects XI Release 2. We were pleasantly surprised at how easy this migration was. All our documents were handled automatically and without any problem.

To manage the migration and its 160 programmed tasks, Groupama used the support of the Business Objects consulting teams. In fact, the migration effort amounted to 250 person-days. Business Objects supplied 150 of these; for development, migration of jobs, re-writing of input forms, installation of products, expertise, coordination, etc. “The migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 could not have been achieved without the help of Business Objects Consulting, as the architecture is new and requires skills that we could not have acquired in a few days," comments Philippe Huriaux. The Business Objects consulting teams also helped Groupama to standardize and customize its Web Intelligence portals for the various applications over which they control access.

For the MOA (project management) of the Groupama accounting department, 70% of the migration project time was spent on development, parameterization and acceptance. 15% was spent on production tasks, and the rest was spent investigating the architecture and on functional analysis.

The Groupama accounting department decided to migrate its three strategic applications, Item, Bibop and Frisbi, at the same time. However, it expected to run the two versions 6.5 and XI Release 2 in parallel until the new platform was totally stable. Throughout the consolidation phase, Business Objects placed Groupama on its “priority account" to guarantee optimum reaction times and response quality. The migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 was achieved within the defined deadlines and budgets.

BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is easier for end users as well. "This is obvious with regard to the prompts,prompts," specifies Sylvain Duchêne, "but the important thing for them is to get their reports quickly. Training is limited, but they do have a user manual." Ultimately, 200 users will work on the three critical applications, Item, Frisbi and Bibop. Some will be able to develop their own reports using Web Intelligence. The IT team is already preparing for future deployments generated in Web Intelligence, when the platform is stable and the users have become adapted to the new environment. The number of users will increase as new applications are provided.

Several new projects have already been programmed on the BusinessObjects XI Release 2 platform. The first is a continuation of a project launched at the end of 2006 to analyze the cash flow differences between plan and actuals, both at the Group and subsidiary level. Groupama was waiting for the release of BusinessObjects XI Release 2, before starting both this project and the Radar project.

Then, the teams will move on to a large technical accounting project in 2007. Its objective is to consolidate all the technical flows from some twenty upstream accounting systems and obtain a view from the insurance angle.

The Defi project will also be initiated. This project deals with the Investments Department reporting based on the data mart consolidating all the data related to the financial management of the Group.