Quickly, Cost-Effectively and Precisely to Requirements
Customer challenge
Limited resources of in house Oracle expertise for creating reports
Solution
Mokum Financial Analyser – an excel plug-in tool enabling easy reporting from Oracle
Key Benefits
- Quick and easy creation of reports
- Low cost of ownership
- Easy-to-distribute Excel reports produced
A self-managed FTSE-100 company with investment trust status, Alliance Trust PLC manages assets of nearly £2.3bn (as at 31 December 2008). Founded in 1888, Alliance Trust is one of the largest UK investment trusts listed on the London Stock Exchange.
A long-term dependence on technical resource
Alliance Trust’s reporting using Oracle E-Business Suite was principally based on customised reports built when the system was first implemented. Significant changes to these reports, or the creation of new ones, required technical expertise that was not available in-house. This meant engaging expensive resource from the contractor market. Alliance Trust wished to find a solution to this costly and time-consuming problem.
Mokum Financial Analyser
Mokum Financial Analyser (MFA) is a reporting tool that populates Excel spreadsheets with live data from Oracle General Ledger. Users change a period, an account number or any other relevant field in the spreadsheet, and instantly they can see their financial balances as held in the Applications. They can also drill down to journal details and sub-ledger entries - all within Excel.
Typically, installation of MFA takes less than a day. Finance users can be producing reports within hours.
Sharing MFA output securely with Mokum Distribution Manager
Mokum Distribution Manager is an add-on that automates the printing, archiving, and distribution or emailing of financial statements and other documents in all common file formats. This enables the team at Alliance Trust to email budget reports or management accounts automatically to a list of recipients each month.
“All Finance people love Excel…”
“As soon as I read about it, I thought that MFA was the tool to address our reporting challenges,” explains Andrew Zimmermann, Financial Controller at Alliance Trust. “Everyone in my team was able to create reports from scratch after just a few hours’ training. All Finance people love Excel, so we can use its functionality to create really professional reports, with corporate colours, logos, charts and so on, that link directly to Oracle and can be refreshed instantly.”
Most accountants look for ways to load Oracle data into Excel spreadsheets – but it can be an arduous process, and as soon as the figures are extracted from the database, they’re out of date. But by using MFA’s dynamic access to live Oracle data, Andrew and his team have very quickly created a suite of reports to serve their reporting needs.
MFA has become an important part of the Finance operation and feedback from the business has been excellent.
