Challenge
After installing Oracle R12, managers at Taconic Inc. lost access to vital transactional details they were accustomed to from legacy system reporting. This innovator in health care research critically needed an efficient reporting solution to fill the gaps in financial information that Oracle left behind.
A year after implementing Oracle in the US, Taconic discovered GL Wand, an Excel-based financial reporting tool from insightsoftware. Via a direct link between Oracle and a user-friendly Excel front end, GL Wand provides immediate access to real-time GL data without a data warehouse, as well as instant drill-down functionality for accessing the transactional details managers were requesting. After a free trial, Taconic recognized GL Wand’s potential for accelerating its month-end and management reporting processes.
Solution
A user test group of five quickly picked up on using GL Wand, with the help of webinars and training conference calls from insightsoftware. The team realized that the GL Wand not only could replace and improve upon FSG reports for monthly reporting, but also delve into GL details for managers. The finance test group helped train other users as GL Wand was rolled out to the Danish and German subsidiaries during their final Oracle go-live process, with excellent results.
“We created static templates in GL Wand so that, with a push of a button, 80% of our monthly reports are prepared and ready for review,” explained Rodney Tillinghast, Taconic’s Corporate Controller. “From a corporate standpoint, we have access to all journal ledgers, so even if it’s the middle of the night in Europe, we can still access all data in a transparent and efficient manner to continue developing monthly packages along a tight deadline. GL Wand provided an immediate improvement in both quality of information and efficiency, helping drive at least four to five days out of our monthly closing process, especially due to GL Wand dashboards and related reports for monitoring the quality of our subsidiaries’ closing processes.”
For management reporting, the improvements were even more dramatic. Within hours of basic GL Wand training, Taconic’s financial analysts had access to information that the IT group had struggled to drill into with Oracle Discoverer.
“It takes us just minutes to pull the transactional details our managers need with GL Wand, which we publish as an Excel file through SharePoint for our managers to review,” said Tillinghast. “Because of easy access to the targeted transactional data like indirect cost allocations, plus support for quality checks and high level reviews, GL Wand has taken up to a week out of our management reporting process. Our original Oracle FSG reports simply did not provide this flexibility.”
GL Wand supports a range of management reporting needs. “We take three or four different looks at a single set of data to support not only individual site locations, but also our two distinct lines of business, as well as our functional responsibility groups for both production and administration costs,” Tillinghast explained. “Because of the segments we defined within the global GL and the ability of GL Wand to pick out discrete activity for those segments, we can easily create reports with different views of the data.”
