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Xansa/BT Wholesale
Seeding intelligence across the enterprise
No one in business doubts the competitive advantage granted by being able to make decisions more quickly and informed with better quality business intelligence. Agility and effectiveness both depend on giving decision makers access to the right information, at the right time - and both ensure profitability.
BT Wholesale and other members of the BT Group, one of the world's leading telcos, knew they would need a new business intelligence strategy if they were to drive down costs and increase profitability. A key BT tactic is to make staff more financially aware by giving them a better understanding of how their actions impact the business. To do that, the Group needed to put more relevant financial intelligence in front of more people, more frequently.
The trouble was, BT's existing bespoke reporting system couldn't deliver. Rather than embark on a costly project to bring this ageing system up to date, BT and its technology partner, Xansa, decided to adopt the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform as a Group-wide reporting standard that had to be put in place.
"We needed a system that would not only allow us to find new ways to disseminate vital financial information throughout the Group, but would also be easy and relatively inexpensive to implement," explains Pete Weeks, Reporting Development Manager at Xansa. "MicroStrategy was the clear winner for both."
Choosing a System for Today and Tomorrow
For more than 12 years, the BT Group's financial reporting was provided by a bespoke system developed in house and based on an Oracle database with PL/SQL-coded reporting tools. This system was due to be taken over by Xansa, the technology consultancy and business process management specialist, chosen by BT to run the Group's accounting and finance operation for seven years from July 1, 2002 in a deal worth over £250 million ($375 million). Formed in 1962, Xansa today lists numerous Fortune 500 companies among its clients and last year achieved annual revenues of £515.1 million ($772.65 million).
BT quickly realized that the system was no longer able to meet the needs of the business. For a start, reports took too long to develop, and then many users were forced to waste time importing the results into other programs. The system was also proving costly to maintain. The development of new reporting tools was equally expensive, requiring many, highly specialized staff. As Group businesses grew - and opened new data sources - integrating them into the reporting systems was proving difficult and expensive.
A change was needed - and quickly. Two choices were open to Xansa and BT: to extend the existing system to deliver the functionality required by the Group today and enable it to meet tomorrow's needs, or replace it with a new, third-party solution. They chose the latter, following a strategic shift at BT away from home-grown solutions, in order to enjoy the cost, quality and ongoing development advantages of products created in a commercial environment. Competition drives innovation and cost-efficiency. It also ensures more reliable products.
According to Weeks, the new solution had to be highly scalable, capable of integrating large volumes of data from diverse sources - from general ledgers, budgets, forecasts, transaction databases and so on - and able to adapt to the evolving needs of the business. That in turn meant it had to simplify the development of new reporting tools, and be easy to implement. It also had to be easy to use.
"We looked at solutions from a variety of vendors," says Weeks, "but we felt that the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform was able to offer us the perfect solution for our needs." One key factor lifted the MicroStrategy solution above rival offerings - its strong Web technology foundation. Support for open standards like XML and Java paved the way for the rapid development of new reporting tools and simplified the delivery of tools offered by the legacy system. It also allowed Xansa to deliver the system directly through the BT intranet.
"One clear advantage of the MicroStrategy platform is that it's very light on the client," explains Weeks, the first business unit within BT to pilot the new system. Reporting applications are delivered through Microsoft Internet Explorer. That not only ensured ease of use but what was effectively a zero-cost client-side roll-out. "We haven't had to update any software or hardware," he adds.
Broadcast Delivery
Xansa and BT Wholesale were particularly impressed with MicroStrategy's Narrowcast Server technology. Traditionally, reporting is a process in which the user consciously 'pulls' data towards them in order to analyse it and reveal useful business intelligence. Narrowcast, however, allows analysis to be automated and 'pushed' to users via email. For many reporting functions, this approach is not only more efficient - a large number of users no longer spend valuable time working on identical reports - but it also makes it easier to get the conclusions of the analyses to all key decision makers, including operational managers who, until then, were unable to see their controllable expenditure.
"This allows us to get information out from the system to a much larger number of people than have had access to this data before - ever," says Jolin Holme, Senior Finance Business Analyst at BT Wholesale. "Over half the Group's 110,000 staff - if not more - will become recipients of essential financial intelligence, thanks to MicroStrategy."
BT Wholesale alone has 31,000 staff, 27,000 of whom - more than 87 per cent of the workforce - receive financial updates by email. By comparison, 3000 finance and key operational people will regularly access the 'self service' reporting system.
BT kicked off its initial implementation of MicroStrategy in April 2000. Such was the success of the BT Wholesale pilot programme, the solution was then rolled out across some of the BT Group's other divisions - Openworld and BT Group Operations - between January 2001 and January 2002, with plans to include the remaining Divisions for roll-out by February 2003.
Biggest MicroStrategy Implementation
The project soon proved to be MicroStrategy's largest enterprise roll-out. Importantly, MicroStrategy soon built a "very good working relationship" with Weeks' team. The company's consultants provided invaluable support during the most complex stages of the roll-out, he recalls. And when MicroStrategy released version 7 of its Business Intelligence Platform, the company was on hand to help the migration to this more feature-rich release. The implementation of MicroStrategy 7 began in November 2001. Despite some extensive development work - "because the data set we hold is large and complex, the conversion process wasn't a matter of just pushing a button", explains Weeks - the new system was able to go live just four months later, in March 2002.
"Since then, we've been engaged in an ongoing development process with BT Wholesale to add additional reporting functionality and at the same time implementing the system within other parts of BT," says Weeks.
"That's been our model for development," adds Holme. "Build in Wholesale, pilot with Wholesale and then reuse that system as much as possible throughout the Group, reducing development time and costs, and building consistency across BT. We've gone from many separate, division-specific implementations of MicroStrategy to a common platform, with common reports, data sets and development work, that nevertheless suits each division's individual needs. It gives us economies of scale."
Thumbs-up from Managers
Users have responded well to the new system, too. Holme talks of a "really enthusiastic" response among staff members who have used the MicroStrategy platform.
Holme admits there's still a job of education to be done: "To show people the benefits of the MicroStrategy system that they haven't discovered for themselves." That goes hand in hand with the final stages of the MicroStrategy roll-out: adding further data sources to MicroStrategy's arsenal; re-presenting and optimising the data for the new system; replicating legacy reporting tools and developing new tools in response to user feedback; and creating further email push applications.
Both Weeks and Holme believe the process is on-track for full availability to employees across the BT Group by February 2003. Beyond that, they plan to explore further MicroStrategy components. "We hope to start looking at the MicroStrategy Transactor workflow processing tool to see whether it can help us close the loop on financial reporting by enabling users to write forecasts, targets and so on back to databases," says Weeks. Holme is keen to explore MicroStrategy's Intelligent Cubes technology. It combines the speed and interactivity of multi-dimensional OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) analysis and the analytical power and depth of relational OLAP to manipulate multi-dimensional data views at the speed of thought.
But however the system evolves, both Holme and Weeks are certain of the very real value the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform has already begun to deliver. "The way the technology supports BT's business aims is really beneficial," says Holme, adding that users will be able to become more productive by getting access to analysis more quickly and to make cost savings through better financial reporting.
That has fuelled their commitment to MicroStrategy. So too has its foundation on open Web standards, easing development and implementation; its scalability across data sources of any size; and its ability to push key financial information out to users across the enterprise, bringing them key decision-making data to which they have never before had access.
Concludes Weeks: "The MicroStrategy Business Intelligence platform is meeting the challenges that BT is demanding of it and is BT Group's business intelligence standard for financial reporting. Our MicroStrategy implementation is a long-term investment."
The Xansa/BT solutionAt the heart of BT's business intelligence solution lies MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, the most sophisticated analysis engine available to business today. Running on Microsoft Windows 2000, it is centrally managed, fault tolerant and highly secure for ease of maintenance. It is capable of answering the most intricate and detailed business questions from raw data sources of any size - a key factor in winning the backing of BT.
MicroStrategy Web allows users to pose those questions through a simple yet highly customisable Web browser-based interface. Users can view design and build reports, view and reformat them, quickly and efficiently. Ad hoc querying is easy too. Tools include high-level financial reporting and in-depth analysis (profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, etcetera), detailed financial transactions (accounts payable, journals, non-financials) and operational management control. These tools are presented to users via the BT Group intranet, accessed through its secure GateKeeper portal. The Group uses MicroStrategy Narrowcast to distribute intelligence to managers automatically, allowing them to focus on cost reduction and profitability improvement even though they may never have used finance systems before.
Two key applications are already being delivered to users throughout BT Wholesale:
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Your Phone Bill - a monthly breakdown of every individual's telecoms costs |
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Your Costs - a monthly P&L breakdown for each cost centre. |
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