Universal studios finds universal appeal in Infor’s business process suite

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Published on the 27/01/2009 | Written by Infor

AT A GLANCE

Universal Studios Hollywood (USH)

INDUSTRY

Media and Entertainment

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Integrate financial systems to tie finance to operations
Focus on process improvement and enterprise-wide value

SOLUTION

Infor PM Business Process Applications

THE BENEFITS

Finance department is deeply integrated with operations
Real-time visibility into both leading and lagging KPIs
Integration has enabled the organisation to save time and costs, while providing reliable information to key stakeholders
Cut budget cycle time in half with Infor PM Business Process Applications

FOR MORE INFORMATION

INFOR
W: INFOR
T: +61 2 9021 7100

PARTNER CONTACT

EMDA
W: EMDA
T: +64 9 921 6600 or
T: +64 3 343 0023
E: info@emda.co.nz

Universal Studios needed to consolidate all its fragmented financial and business systems on to a common platform…

California-based Universal Studios Hollywood (USH), part of media and entertainment giant NBC Universal, is comprised of seven distinct businesses: operations, entertainment, ticketing, food service, merchandising, maintenance, and real estate management.

Using its existing spreadsheet-based system, the organisation found that trying to create budgets using the drivers unique to each area of the business, as well as measuring differing key performance indicators (KPIs), and then bringing all the information together into a conglomerate model, was extremely challenging.

USH implemented Infor PM Business Process Applications to not only integrate its financial systems, but to eventually tie finance to operations and focus on process improvement and enterprise-wide value.

Setting the strategy
Chris Monning, CFO at NBC Universal, notes that the former spreadsheet-based budgeting and reporting system couldn’t handle the rising demand for financial and operational analysis as the business grew.

“We weren’t able to perform some of the critical tasks that we needed to, like category and channel management, labor scheduling optimisation, and providing on-demand visibility into KPIs,” he says. The company had fragmented data sources and practices across different business units, and inconsistent metrics and model assumptions because their budget builds didn’t happen in one place.

USH began to research world-class companies and established a set of criteria for the system that they would eventually purchase.

They wanted a common platform with consistent models and metrics across all business units. They needed to be able to run simulation models for analysis, since key drivers like attendance were crucial factors in food service and merchandising operations.

The company also wanted to streamline processes and institutionalise best practices, and applied a gap analysis on each of the six key financial processes to determine how to improve them and thus allow USH to develop a proactive rather than reactive culture.

“Data collection and report generation take too much of the typical finance organisation’s time,” says Monning. “Instead of spending 80 percent of our time on data gathering, we wanted to spend it on data analysis.” USH also wanted “one source of truth” to enable it to better address Sarbanes-Oxley demands.

Monning also notes that his company’s research pointed to the need for finance’s involvement in any finance system decisions. “IT is a critical partner, of course. But if the focus is performance management,” he says, “finance must own the process.”

Getting business specific
USH had a vision of an enterprise-wide system whose components would integrate seamlessly. The company already had invested in a data warehouse solution to track ticketing information, but knew it needed robust budgeting functionality in order to quickly and successfully do scenario modeling for 200 venues across 7 businesses.

Infor PM Business Process Applications were implemented along with an ERP solution that would feed aggregated P&L performance data into the Infor software for financial reporting. The Infor solution is also used to build daily budgets, which are then fed back into the data warehouse solution and to the ERP solution at the monthly level.

USH’s two-way integration between Infor PM and SAP was essential to their success. With this integration, financial performance information is extracted from SAP on a nightly basis. Data Transformation Services (DTS) from Microsoft SQL Server, an ETL tool, then manipulates the information into the appropriate weekly reporting period while verifying its correctness. Data is then loaded with Infor PM’s OpenLink data loader. If information anomalies are encountered, they are reviewed the next morning and corrected.

The information extracted from SAP and loaded into Infor PM comprises 300 accounts, including profit and loss information for 150 profit/cost centers across 22 companies. The data consists of actual account balances and statistical information, which drives 15 key performance indicators that USH uses to run their business.

As budgets are processed and finalised using the budgeting functionality in Infor PM, information is pulled directly from the database tables, manipulated by DTS, and taken into SAP (using the .dat loading functions in SAP) for comparison reporting against daily transactions.

Seeing results
Today, USH’s finance department is deeply integrated with operations. The company has real-time visibility into both leading and lagging KPIs, as well as detailed category and sales channel penetration and scenario-enabled modeling with detail on both risk management and variance analysis.

The company’s source systems are completely integrated with financial process controls. With a set of common drivers, Infor PM’s budgeting and forecasting capabilities have eliminated the former process of running consolidations via spreadsheets for seven different business lines and then folding all of that information back together, only to learn that different assumptions had been used.

USH enlisted the assistance of an Infor Professional Services Organisation database architect to start and guide the project approach and provide appropriate tools for the integration project. However, USH used their own information technology resources to complete the project. The integration exceeded their expectations and contributes to their 50 percent cycle time reduction. The integration has allowed the organisation to save time and cost while providing reliable information to those who need it.

Being open to an enterprising future
“We have cut our budget cycle time in half with Infor PM Business Process Applications,” says Monning. What’s even more important, he says, is that this solution has enabled USH to leverage best practices that help finance provide timely information to all their key stakeholders. “Infor PM is helping us create value.”