INDUSTRY	Workers' comp insurer
COMPANY SIZE	$1 billion
ERP/GENERAL LEDGER	Oracle
BUDGETING	N/A
FINANCIAL CONSOLIDATION & REPORTING	MIS DecisionWare from Systems Union

Inefficient financial reporting processes can handicap a business's ability to compete in the marketplace. Although the benefits of better reporting are widely recognized, many companies continue to rely on Excel for this vital function. Six years ago, Zenith Insurance Company accelerated its reporting processes, and finance director Patrick Dwiggins has never looked back.

BPM: Would you describe the BPM software setup your company now uses?

Patrick Dwiggins: We use the Oracle Financials suite (G/L, A/P, fixed assets, etc.). We use MIS Alea for the majority of our financial reporting. It sits on top of Oracle Financials, and we have extracts from Oracle that feed the MIS Alea cubes. We use MIS Alea's Excel integration to generate most of the financial reports that we do for statutory reporting and SEC reporting.

BPM: Do you have an internal management reporting process as well?

Dwiggins: Yes. It's pretty similar. We generate cost center expense reports and financial reports that we distribute to our cost center managers. For ad hoc questions that we can't answer with prebuilt reports, we use MIS Alea's "slice and dice" capabilities.

BPM: How frequently do you run the management reports, and who gets them?

Dwiggins: The financial management team can run reports anytime they want, so I honestly can't tell you how frequently they're run. It's more frequent at the month- and quarter-ends. They'll be run probably every half hour or so around that time. During slower times, they'll probably be run once a day.

The reason we can run them so often is that the data stored in MIS Alea is refreshed every 20 minutes from Oracle Financials, and it takes less than one minute to refresh the cubes. Most reports take less than five seconds to recalculate; our largest reports take less than 10 seconds. Users love the fact that we can refresh the cube on demand. They can post an entry to the general ledger and, within minutes, see its impact on the financial statements. This has made it easier to enter, reconcile, and analyze the data while closing the books.

BPM: How have your financial reporting processes changed over time?

Dwiggins: Closing the books and preparing financial reports used to be extremely difficult. We had no easy way to extract data from the general ledger. Our reports were very limited and could not be modified easily. In fact, any modification had to be done by the IT department. This meant that the change request had to get in line behind other requests, which delayed the report from getting modified for days or even weeks.

It took between 15 and 20 days to close the books, even though we performed very little analysis. When we were purchasing a reporting tool, it was important to me for end users to be able to make their own reports and perform ad hoc analysis without having to wait for IT to help them. With the help of MIS Alea, we can now close the books in less than five days, which includes analysis and financial statement preparation time.

BPM: What changes do you expect to implement in the future?

Dwiggins: Our management reporting package displays many metrics by branch, cost center, product, state, etc. Right now, our cost center managers, branch managers, and executives rely on finance to e-mail reports to them. I plan to migrate this to a Web-based deployment and give them the ability to run the reports just like our finance managers do -- as real-time as possible.