Business Intelligence Success Story
Energy Distribution, Supply and Service Company Reduces Month-End Closing Procedures by 3 days with Reporting Solution
ENMAX
ENMAX Corporation (ENMAX) is an energy distribution, supply and service company that operates and competes in Alberta’s restructured electricity industry. A wholly owned subsidiary of The City of Calgary, ENMAX is headquartered in Calgary, AB, Canada.
Challenge
ENMAX, an energy distribution, supply and service company had implemented PeopleSoft as their primary ERP solution. However, the application was unable to meet their reporting and analytical requirements specifically in the area of having an Ad Hoc analytical environment. Additionally, ENMAX also required the ability to view current and historical financial data using historical snapshots of chart of accounts, departmental hierarchy and divisional hierarchy.
Solution
The project was initiated to create a data warehouse and analytical cubes to support their reporting and analytical requirements. Ideaca embarked on extracting the data and related hierarchies from PeopleSoft. The data warehouse was then created with monthly snapshots of the Account, Department and Division hierarchies, thereby allowing any fact record to be rolled up using any current or historical snapshot. The two analysis cubes were created following the data warehouse, one for the current hierarchies and one for all historical hierarchies. The solution has been rolled out to all Financial Analysts at ENAMX and is being used to create their monthly reporting packages and related analysis.
Benefits
The Customer Integration Architecture project has allowed ENMAX to realize the following benefits:
- Reduced reporting time
- The amount of time required to generate reports on a monthly basis reduced from multiple days to hours and the turnaround time on new reports reduced from weeks to hours. Overall, the solutions has reduced month-end closing procedures by 3 days
- Increased reporting and analytical capabilities
- The ability to control the data and reporting process from end to end by the data analysts has greatly increased ENMAX’s reporting and analytical capabilities. In addition, since reporting doesn’t need to go through a complex development process, more ad hoc analysis is being performed and management is able to deal with questions and concerns immediately as opposed to days later
- Increased Reporting Consistency
- The removal of disparate reporting approaches like manual data dumps, hard coded PeopleSoft reports etc. has meant a much higher degree of data consistency and reliability. As the versions of each report remain consistent, data remains consistent and this allows the analysis to be more accurate than ever experienced
- Satisfy Regulatory Reporting Requirements
- The existing PeopleSoft reporting capabilities were unable to support their custom account hierarchy and reporting needs to support their regulatory reporting requirements. The new reporting solution enabled this reporting seamlessly with no additional training or configuration on the users part
