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Thrivent Financial Looks Ahead with Planning, Budgeting, and Reporting from Business Objects

"Business Objects Planning provided us with the flexibility to design and configure a solution that mirrored our expense forecasting process. The users really like the Excel interface, and the Business Objects support team was second to none—very knowledgeable and responsive."

Garrett Gleason
IT vice president of corporate and commission systems
Thrivent Financial

Challenge

Based in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans is a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization helping nearly 3 million members achieve their financial goals and give back to their communities. Thrivent Financial and its affiliates offer a wide range of financial products and services, including life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, disability income insurance, bank products, and more. As a not-for-profit organization, Thrivent Financial also sponsors national outreach programs that support Lutheran congregations, schools, charitable organizations, and individuals in need. In 2006, the organization's assets under management totaled $70.6 billion, while its charitable outreach totaled $316.2 million.

In 2006, Thrivent Financial decided to reexamine its expense management system and process to see if it could bring in a new system that would better support a move from calendar-based budgeting to rolling quarterly forecasts. "Our budgeting tool wasn't user-friendly and lacked functionality to support forecasting," says Paul Kolell, finance director at Thrivent Financial. "Therefore, areas throughout the organization were using spreadsheets to track their budgets and forecasts, and there was very little control over the numbers. We lacked a consistent way of forecasting expenses and looking at variances." Kurt Tureson, director of affiliate and expense management at Thrivent Financial, adds, "The corporate accounting staff manually keyed in the budgets for the various departments in the organization so users did not have to interface with an unreliable system."

The company decided to seek a new tool for forecasting, to better manage expenses and to change its process with support from a planning and forecasting solution.

Approach

Thrivent Financial identified key goals - process improvement, best-of-breed functionality, ease of use, better control, and a common reporting tool. After a formal product selection process, Thrivent Financial chose BusinessObjects™ Planning from Business Objects, an SAP company. Thrivent Financial was already using the BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) system for reporting and recognized the importance of combining performance management with business intelligence. Differentiators that became apparent during the selection process included the product's Excel interface, the ability to set up dimensions, the ease of setting up the system compared to competitors, and its ease of use as compared to Thrivent's previous system.

"Our finance partners are used to working with Excel, so being able to work with that kind of a format was appealing," says Christine Nelson, finance partner at Thrivent Financial. Business Objects also supports Thrivent Financial's goal of using one tool for reporting. "We don't want people to jump from system to system to access the data they need. Our goal has been to have as much reporting as possible within the BusinessObjects Planning module," says Nelson.

Results

Today, Thrivent Financial has rolled out BusinessObjects Planning to 500 end users, who include midlevel and senior management in finance as well as administrative employees. End users are able to drill down on information, and make changes to forecasts. "With BusinessObjects Planning, we have a much more efficient process, and we're able to generate reports more quickly," says Ted Kobold, finance IT manager at Thrivent Financial. "To get the budget data into the table that we would report from, we ran an overnight batch process that created a one-day lag. Now, employees enter their forecast and it's immediately available for reporting."

Rather than maintaining an array of spreadsheets, end users navigate a BusinessObjects Planning workbook that helps review and manipulate data. Each of the functional sections presents the relevant information. For example, an employee staffing section lets managers look at current staff and make any changes, such as adding or deleting a position. They can navigate to another section to review expenses and potentially make some adjustments, and then navigate to another section to examine consulting or legal fees or other types of expenses. Tureson says, "We can build out the forecast much more efficiently because of the various sections within the forecasting workbook. There is much less data that needs to be entered."

Users report a range of benefits. Nelson says, "In my division, the users see a big improvement from a very labor-intensive process to a solution where much of the data is pre-populated for them and they just need to verify data or make any changes they know now that they didn’t know last month." Kolell adds, "Users like the ease of getting in and out of the system, being able to forecast expenses without spending a ton of time, and not losing what they've done the previous month."

Another benefit is a more accurate forecast. Kolell says, "Before, there were more unknowns when you had an annual budgeting process. Now, we update the forecast monthly and only forecast for what is known in terms of expenses." Tureson adds, "We were really constrained by our previous tool. The ability to configure the tool to meet our business needs is providing us with opportunities that we didn't have before."

Thrivent Financial is poised to adjust spending to meet quickly evolving factors, such as business or economic conditions or external events, like a natural disaster. Thrivent Financial has tied the forecasting tool to its overall affordability methodology. If sales are running differently than planned, employees can assess quarter-to-quarter impact to overall profitability of the organization. That data helps Thrivent manage members' money as wisely, efficiently, and effectively as possible.

Thrivent Financial recognizes several benefits with the new system. Tureson says, "The flexibility, usability, and one source of data all make a difference. Changes in internal processes are also a key piece of the puzzle. You can't just roll out a new forecasting tool like this without concentrating on the overall processes." Kobold adds, "The support the technical team received from Business Objects during the implementation was second to none – it's been very good."

As Thrivent Financial moves forward with its implementation, the financial planning team anticipates greater efficiencies. Kobold says, "Our ultimate goal is to integrate with our BusinessObjects XI environment for even more extensive reporting."

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Quick Facts

• Industry:
  Financial services
• Business pain:
  Thrivent Financial lacked control over expense and finance processes, and required more flexible, robust reporting.
• Why Business Objects?
  Easy-to-use, fully functional planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities from Business Objects help Thrivent Financial meet its expense management goals.
• Business Objects products and services:
  BusinessObjects Planning