Q3 builds a budgeting and forecasting model that can support the needs of the individual brands while minimizing both IT support and the technical expertise required by the Finance administrators.

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Business Situation

Build a budgeting and forecasting model that can support the needs of the individual brands while minimizing both IT support and the technical expertise required by the Finance administrators. The brand consisted of different products.

Challanges

• Separate applications could provide the flexibility required by the individual brands but would increase development time and ongoing technical support.
• Reporting requirements are significantly different in each brand.
• A single application would reduce technical support but negatively impact planning flexibility and possibly reduce performance and reliability.
• The primary business hierarchies must stay in sync with all brands.
• Planning administration in each brand must require a minimum of training since turn-over is relatively high in the finance groups.
• A combined corporate view of actuals, budgets and forecasts must be supported.

Solution

• OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder) was used as the ETL tool for loading data into the warehouse from different data sources:
  
  Consolidating data from heterogeneous data sources such as ERP systems, OLTP databases.
  
  Migrating data from legacy systems.
• Data modeling of relational and dimensional structures.
• Have separate physical Essbase databases for each brand while having a commonly maintained outline, calculation scripts, and automation procedures.
• OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) was used for reporting and analysis as per business requirements:
• Different kinds of reports created for different users. These reports were generated on the data loaded in Essbase. Included functionality in the database to allow any account to either have direct input or be calculated as a percentage of a selected driver (revenue, headcount, etc.)
  
  Allows the brands to decide how each account is calculated.
• Task each brand administrator with building their own reports, input templates and alternate hierarchies.
  
  Gives each brand the flexibility to internally report their business in the manner their management desires to see it. -Brands can share reports and templates where appropriate