Press Release For Immediate Release

Performance Analytics Corporation Consolidation Starter Kit Achieves

Certified Integration with SAP® BusinessObjects™ Solutions

Solution Delivers a Rapid Implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation

Toronto, ON – August 2, 2011 – Performance Analytics Corporation today announced its Consolidation Starter Kit version 1.0 has achieved certified integration with the SAP® BusinessObjects® Planning and Consolidation application. The Consolidation Starter Kit significantly reduces the time and cost to implement SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, which can lead to a higher return on investment and increased customer satisfaction.

The SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC) has certified that Consolidation Starter Kit version 1.0 integrates with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation version 7.5 for the Microsoft platform via the analytic content package for SAP BusinessObjects (BO-CNT) 3.1 integration scenario.

“We are delighted to announce the successful achievement of SAP certification for Consolidation Starter Kit,” said Peter Digby, president, Performance Analytics Corporation.  “The ability of the Consolidation Starter Kit to immediately leverage the business potential of solutions from SAP will prove highly beneficial to current and future customer engagements.”

The Consolidation Starter Kit provides predefined dimensionality, reports and data input schedules, which when implemented alongside SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation helps customers speed time to value.  Customers can be up and running with SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation in weeks and gain the benefit of years of experience that is now built into the Starter Kit. This starter kit complements SAP’s own portfolio of starter kits that are delivered as part of a number of solutions in the SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management (EPM) portfolio.  For more information on the Consolidation Starter Kit, please visit http://www.performanceanalytics.ca/workshops/downloads-form/.

About Performance Analytics Corporation

Performance Analytics Corporation specializes in technology for the office of the CFO and specifically on delivering Enterprise Performance Management solutions for financial and operational reporting. We work with customers to develop targeted solutions for improved business performance. We combine our deep understanding of finance with many years of practical experience to deliver planning, budgeting, financial consolidation, and reporting applications.  For more information, please visit www.performanceanalytics.ca.

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Consolidation Starter Kit is a trademark of Performance Analytics Corporation.

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.

Business Objects, BusinessObjects and the Business Objects logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries.  Business Objects is an SAP company.

All other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information, please contact:

Laura Barnett, Marketing Manager

Performance Analytics Corporation

Laura.barnett@performanceanalytics.ca

905-808-6305

In a recent webinar presentation, Kinross explained how SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC) was used to address the challenges of consolidating financial and operational results from multiple international locations and disparate source systems. They gained the ability to close the books faster, improved access to data, and simplified the reporting process.

Benefits
• Easy access to financial and operational data
• Ability to generate monthly internal consolidated results and quarterly financial statements
• Ability to issue audited financial statements simultaneously with publicly announced quarterly results
• Ability to complete consolidated balance sheet profit and loss, and cash flow statements 50% faster
• Ability to track operational metrics, including consumption of carbon emitting substances

The presentation slides are available here and the recorded webinar session can be found in our Download Recorded Demonstration section.

Invite colleagues who may also be interested, as it is a great way to network with other users, make contacts that you can collaborate with, and stay current on what is happening with BPC.

Seating is limited, so sign up early and reserve the date in your calendar – May 19, 12:30 – 5:00 EDT, at the Royal York Hotel.  For agenda details and to sign up, please click here.

We look forward to seeing you there.

• What changes have been made?
• When?
• By whom?

Minimal traceability in Excel

While the Excel file may contain basic information such as the date of last modifications and the user who saved the file, changes in the substance of the workbook will not be easily traceable.

Imagine yourself in the position of an external auditor: you may find it very difficult, and sometimes impossible to trace the origin and nature of modifications of data in Excel spreadsheets within a reasonable amount of time to reach the level of comfort necessary to certify accounts.

Not only an issue during the close process where central finance and auditors may seek to investigate and verify figures, the lack of strong audit trails also has a key impact on the post-close audit sign-off in compliance with regulatory requirements.

The audit trail and Excel limits

An audit trail establishes a chronological record of system activities to enable the reconstruction and examination of the sequence of events and/or changes in an event.  In other words, log entries with who has accessed the spreadsheet and what operations the user has performed during a given period of time. But an audit trail should also provide the ability to trace data from source to disclosure, step by step (manual entries, automated copy or calculation).

Recording changes by username may prevent fraudulent changes of a spreadsheet parameters, and help recover from unwanted changes.

Upgrading Excel to get a more detailed access log would require developing a visual basic script running in background, or purchasing a third party Excel add-in to track changes. However, non-native features like these require more maintenance and expertise, and may also slow down the whole process.

Another solution consists of comparing the new and the previous version of the spreadsheet: this is time consuming and keeping multiple copies of files can be problematic as explained in previous entry “Reason #4 – Collaboration and communication is inconsistent and difficult”

Anyway, these custom solutions tend to take Excel further away from the path of transparency and traceability of the data processed inside the spreadsheet. More standardized systems with built-in audit functions are more likely to respond these needs.

Key for a strong audit trail

A strong audit trail for budgeting requires a database featuring multi-dimensional analysis.  This can greatly help in storing additional information on the origin of data, as well as different versions of it (suppressing the need for multiple spreadsheet copies).

Detailed and automated audit trail from source to disclosure can be a key tool to reinforce process controls, especially when a close process, as so many do, involves a lot of late data changes and journal entries.

Enterprise Performance Management solutions such as SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation have built-in audit capabilities to automatically track data and application changes to every detail (changes in values, time stamp, user stamp, etc.).

Transparency and traceability are also improved within the composition of data as an intersection of dimensions and the sum of dimension members.  It is then possible to slice and dice a global amount to its source and explain each transformation according to the data source dimension.

Also, from a system administration point of view, the ability to intelligently fix problems and prevent repeated mistakes starts with the ability to recreate the scenario that led to the problem or mistake in the first place. Too many users underestimate the practical value of system activity logs and/or related audit trails. Make sure your new system has built-in system audit trails that are useful to you.

Organizations that solely rely on Excel as their budgeting tool find such structural changes to be very common and awfully difficult to manage, and I concur with them. Almost every template and report needs to be modified to incorporate that new account that probably appears in the middle of a financial statement or an expense template. Similarly, that cost center needs to be deleted from one group and added to another group from all the relevant reports and templates. To modify that report for the meeting, one would most likely have to create the report from scratch. The subsidiary column will need to be deleted causing changes in relevant excel calculations.

These changes cause broken links between spreadsheets and workbooks that needs to be again analyzed and fixed. Furthermore, these structural changes require changes in calculations to be made in the excel sheets (example – add calculations for allocating to that new account or modify calculations that reference values from that deleted subsidiary), forcing you to scrutinize and modify each formula until you finally have made all the amendments and the results seem to be right.

Clearly, this process is time-consuming, painstaking, unreliable, and ultimately costly. This limitation of poor ability of making structural changes needs to be addressed through tools that can make excel more flexible and dynamic to changes.

As mentioned in previous discussion treads, planning and reporting entails a number of cycles to deliver on the final version of a budget, forecast or set of financial statements. To achieve this, an organization requires the ability to gather, consolidate and update information from the various business units and functions in a consistent and timely fashion. In a spreadsheet based environment this is often times a pain staking process that can be qualified as:

• Labour intensive leaving little time for insightful analysis, communication, and corrective actions
• Error prone with a lack of change control over data updates, business rules, and calculations
• Nurturing doubt and uncertainty due by multiple versions of the data lying on desktops, servers, email inbox
• Disorganized, lacking in process control to guide end users to ensure process consistency and compliance as well as approvals to ensure the quality of the information.

These caveats can be circumvented through the use the Enterprise Performance Solution, SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC). With the adapted tools and processes, here are a few example of how collaboration and communication can be improved:

• Single version of the truth
  Data is stored in a central repository for real time update and a consistent application of metrics calculations and consolidation rules to all data (actual, forecast, and budget). This data can be delivered to a variety of interfaces suited to each audience such as corporate dashboards.
• Multi-versioning
  Each version resulting from the many cycles is stored to permit variance analysis and to host scenarios resulting from ‘what-if’ analysis.
• Business Process Flow (BPF) functionality
  Processes are modeled in a step by step, graphical interface to guide end users and ensure process consistency and compliance. This provides real time monitoring capability to ensure everyone has submitted, reviewed  and approved the information before moving on to the next step. With automated email notifications for completion and approval, this ensures a reliable and consistent communication framework.
• Support for unstructured data

Support documents are no longer scattered on desktops or servers and communicated via email. They are stored in a central secured repository where their most recent revision is available to all in a timely fashion.

Equations can be imbedded in Excel files but will be unique to that workbook.  It is possible that one calculation for ROE, for example, includes certain assets while another calculation does not.  The result is that when the reports are compared the underlying data will be questioned.   The solution is to standardize equations across the entire organization.  Centrally developed and approved spreadsheets with imbedded calculations are one possible solution but they impede the on-the-fly analysis that is one of key benefits of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC).  The best way to handle this situation is to have the formula stored centrally as well so that everyone uses the same calculation.

In addition to having the same definitions across the organization there is financial intelligence within BPC that can be taken advantage of.  Take the example of a variance report (Actual vs. Budget).  In Excel it would require considering each variance in terms of whether and increase is a good thing (income or assets) or a bad thing (expenses or liabilities).  SAP BPC has the ability to automatically consider the type of account when displaying the variance and can be incorporated into any Excel report.

Excel is fast, flexible, and very powerful; why not combine the best of Excel with centralized formulas (to go along with the centralized database)?

Spreadsheets have significant reliability problems.  Research studies estimate that roughly 94% of spreadsheets deployed in the budgeting and audit field contain errors. One of the major reasons for this is the manual updating of data that is prone to human error, calculation mistakes and other issues attached to manual interference. These updates not only cause data quality issues but are also a huge waste of time for organizations trying to meet budget deadlines.  This problem is accentuated when there are dozens of sheets in different workbooks for individuals to update.  Furthermore, implementing and updating a complex model on a cell-at-a-time basis requires tedious attention to detail.  Authors have difficulty remembering the meanings of hundreds or thousands of cell addresses that appear in formulas and the correction of formulas can be a huge exercise in itself.  In addition, manual updates can cause overwriting of data into the same sheet by different individuals in an organization. 

Spreadsheets by themselves can be loosely structured, and because of this, it’s easy for someone to introduce an error, either accidentally or intentionally, by entering information in the wrong place or expressing dependencies among cells incorrectly.  Each of these manual corrections increases the risk of introducing further mistakes and causing data corruption.

I have seen many budgeting models built on excel that require manual updating of data every month/quarter/year.  These models desperately need an automated process where data can be calculated using consistent drivers or formulas that are stored centrally, thereby closing the door on manual interference of data and saving considerable time.  Of course, there will always be requirements to enter some data manually.  However, tools can be used to reduce manual entry as much as possible to standardize data updating process and to solve data quality issues.

Over the next few weeks Performance Analytics Corporation will be putting a little more focus on exploring these limitations, and begin to describe how we can help implement tools and processes to alleviate the pains points that finance users are all too familiar with.

Let’s start with the first limitation – the fact that the data is local to the spreadsheet.  Each time an individual saves a spreadsheet, they are creating a static version of the data.  A version that is difficult to use when performing comparisons and, on occasion, making it difficult to know which version is correct.  When the simplest change is necessary, it requires a lot of manual work.  Sharing the file requires a process of sending or saving it to a common location which is generally not preferred and far from practical.

For most organizations, the budgeting cycle involves an iterative process.  A budget may go through several cycles before senior management can agree on the final results.   Over the years, I’ve encountered budgeting cycles that involve hundreds of spreadsheets, and several iterations and versions, while the key vehicle for storing and distributing the information is Excel through email.   Ultimately, it leads to a lengthy budget cycle with a tremendous amount of wasted time.  Individuals are continuously sending and collecting spreadsheets, attempting to consolidate the results, validate for errors, and then distribute the final product.

As organizations grow out of an Excel based approach they seek a solution that will remove these limitations, enhance their business processes, and reliability in the numbers.  All that being said, to abandon Excel altogether hardly seems possible.  You need to be able to leverage the tools you know and build on them. Introduce new methods and tools that will drive the results expected.

Watch for upcoming blogs on additional Excel issues.