A wish to reduce manual labour
Before, it took hours, required excessive manual labour, and the results were questionable. Today, Business Controller John B. Birger Christensen at DaimlerChrysler Financial Services Denmark/Sweden (DCFS) can easily create key figure analyses and react quickly to changes in the market on his PC.
DaimlerChrysler’s primary products are luxury cars, such as Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler and Jeep, and DCFS is DaimlerChrysler’s own financing company. The main products are leasing, loans and financing when businesses - and individuals - buy trucks, taxis, vans, passenger cars and company cars.
“The requirements for our analyses are extensive. Previously, it could easily take two to three hours of hard work to create an analysis, and it required a lot of manual labour typing in spreadsheets. The figures were rarely 100 % dependable and had to be re-calculated. It was not at all motivating, and I have definitely not studied economics to spend my time collecting data”, John B. Birger Christensen says. Often, DCFS even had to involve the company's IT department as the analyses easily became so complex that IT professionals had to create them.
TARGIT gathers data from all sources
To reduce manual labour involved in creating analyses, DCFS decided to purchase a data warehouse solution based on Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 and TARGIT’s user-friendly application, TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite. Every night, the SQL Server makes copies of all information from the two source databases, Microsoft XAL and Access, and thereby becomes an "Information Warehouse" from where data is freely accessible for analysis using TARGIT.
Recently, the solution was upgraded to also include budget figures. “We have restructured the data on the server in 2006 and thereby included budget figures”, says Christensen. This upgrade was mainly based on internal IT-resources, as Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 is a common standard application.
Fast and credible analyses
Things have changed considerably after the implementation of TARGIT. Now John B. Birger Christensen can make all thinkable analyses across the contact database and the accounting system on his own computer. “It has provided us with a user-friendly tool for making analyses for the unexpected high priority tasks. Now I get responses to my questions in less than 30 seconds. And the graphical user interface, with bars and diagrams, makes the application ideal for making presentations”, he explains, and adds that the credibility of the results has increased as well.
