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Customers In The Spotlight

"Through our collaboration with LogicaCMG, we greatly simplified our reporting system. The customized BI solution implemented with Business Objects tools gives us easy access to the information we need to manage our business, at the required drill-down level."

Thomas Zetek
director financial controlling
IKB Leasing

Challenge

With the new IAS/IFRS and Basel II regulations, IKB Leasing had to meet several key challenges. In the course of renewing the processing system for its core business operations, and in order to deal with its full range of reports - which had gradually become more and more decentralized and heterogeneous - a more modern and flexible reporting system was required based on logged, consolidated data.

The first requirement laid down by the executives and controllers was to be able to quickly generate reports and launch simplified ad hoc queries. Furthermore, in preparation of the future integration of the foreign subsidiaries, they attributed equal importance to the level of scalability of the proposed solution.

Solution

The goal of the project was to create a consolidated database based on the SAP systems already used by IKB Leasing in order to deliver a flexible and comprehensive reporting system. On the organizational level, an interdisciplinary body called the “data committee” was set up to channel the demand flows of users constantly requiring new reports. Composed of employees from the various departments and IT operations staff, this multidisciplinary body is responsible for identifying reporting needs, classifying reports, and ensuring coordination with the business experts.

Business transactions are logged and consolidated in a data warehouse to facilitate analysis, thus ensuring permanent high quality of the data.With regard to the software, a comprehensive Business Objects solution was chosen, particularly for the integration offered between Data Integrator and SAP.

According to the LogicaCMG methodology, the entire project was broken down into phases. That way they were able to respond quickly to the business requirements of the divisional managers, in the form of intermediate results, and to give them an idea of the future performance of the system.

The overall project was submitted to a very demanding management control department. Stringent quality assurance measures were then added at every level and at each stage. This approach produced results of exceptional quality, and led to an excellent acceptance of the deployed solution.

Benefits

Until that point, to collect mission critical performance indicators, IKB Leasing had to use many different and inconsistent charts, and launch multiple queries. A department could neither reproduce the results nor establish their history.

With the new BI solution, management of the controlling department, executives, and the various branches of IKB Leasing can now access centralized, reliable, and audited information. The company plans to integrate data on its foreign subsidiaries.

Outlook

IKB Leasing has the option of upgrading its data warehouse to meet its new requirements. The next steps have already been initiated: extending the existing reporting system and integrating foreign subsidiaries. To enrich the historical and statistical view of the data, IKB Leasing also plans to acquire a performance management solution with business planning and forecast scenarios that will eventually allow it to monitor market trends and react proactively.

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Quick Facts

• Industry:
  Financial management
• About IKB Leasing:
  With €500 million of new business revenue - mainly machinery - IKB Leasing GmbH is one of the largest and most reputed German leasing companies. It has 11 branches in Germany and four international subsidiaries.