NTT Communications, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, has selected the PrecisionPoint Focus BI solution to manage and accelerate the financial ‘close to report’ cycle and transform cross company financial insight.

The contract was awarded following extensive research to find a business intelligence tool that would work with Microsoft Navision and meet NTT Europe’s needs for in-depth financial reporting and analysis and ability to report in multiple currencies.

The implementation of PrecisionPoint Focus will alleviate two distinct problems faced by NTT. Firstly, it had proved impossible to consolidate the databases into one tool to deliver reporting by business unit and secondly, while Navision supports multiple dimensions within the finance database, it can only report on two dimensions.

Not able to undertake a rapid comparison of performance against budget, “It took four or five working days to do a financial close and the finance team then had to undertake a huge amount of manual work to get the results across to the business units,” explains Aad Schrader, Management Accountant, NTT Europe. PrecisionPoint Focus is expected to reduce the reporting overhead by 100 hours each month, far in excess of the 30 hours required to deliver a fast pay back.

It is the reliability of the financial numbers that will be of critical benefit. As the time taken to refresh the PrecisionPoint cube takes just 2 hours, “This means that managers can check variance to last month at any time in any way we want to see the numbers. As a result of being able to check the numbers throughout the month, by country and by business unit, any potential problems are immediately raised ensuring month end figures are already accepted by the business before they are published,” adds Schrader.

In addition to the high level numbers, the introduction of PrecisionPoint Focus will enable NTT Europe to provide country and business unit finance managers with the ability to drill down through the data to gain real insight into the underlying performance drivers. The quality of the financial insight has the capacity to drive business direction and to enable managers to make far better, more informed decisions. “In the past, the information was there but making the link was difficult,” Schrader concludes.

“Efficient management of the Close to Report Cycle (C2R) is a barometer of success for the Finance function and it is no longer acceptable to rely on manually driven spreadsheet systems,” comments Michael Evans, CEO, PrecisionPoint. “Best-in-class organizations aim to significantly enhance their service by ensuring they offer speed, transparency, auditability, accuracy and simplicity as a standard and thereby create a solid foundation for performance evaluation and support for better decision making.”