Your data should tell you a story. A story about where your organization has been, where it is today, and where it is going tomorrow. For most organizations the challenge is in identifying the right data components and putting them together in a way that’s easy to understand and easy for users of all types and skill sets to understand. Our team at Revelwood is extremely proud of how we’ve helped hundreds of organizations get the right stories from their data. Read these case studies to understand what analytics can do for you.
Rayonier Makes Better Use of Resources with IBM Cognos TM1
Rayonier, a real estate investment trust (REIT), is one of the largest private landowners in the U.S. The company owns, leases or manages approximately 2.7 million acres of timberlands in the U.S. South, U.S. Pacific Northwest.
“Activities that used to take several days can now be done in less than a day. We have more visibility, and we’ve pushed planning down to more individuals. People are now much closer to the process. And overall, people are much more productive.”
Bill Tan
Senior Accounting Manager
Rayonier
Challenge
Rayonier wanted to move away from the myriad of budgeting, finance and reporting systems it was using across multiple divisions onto one single, more easily used and managed solution.
Solution
Revelwood built several custom, complex models using IBM Cognos TM1 to incorporate unique aspects of Rayonier’s business, such as timber harvests and land sales, while also streamlining activities that were previously cumbersome.
Benefits
- Streamlined processes with faster and more efficient close processes
- Greater visibility, increased participation and more ownership
- Significant hard and soft financial savings
Leveraging Complex Modeling in IBM Cognos TM1 at New York Blood Center
Transforming financial planning and reporting for one of the largest independent, community-based blood centers in the country enables Finance to be seen as a value-added partner to the organization.
“With easy access to such powerful financial information in TM1, Finance is seen as a value-added partner to our businesses and is able to support them in making strategic decisions that will enable us to meet our growth objectives.”
Beth Gibson
CFO
New York Blood Center
Challenge
New York Blood Center needed to completely overhaul its financial reporting system and processes in order to deliver more accurate, consistent and timelier information to its senior executives and Board of Directors.
Solution
Revelwood built several custom and complex models in IBM Cognos TM1 to incorporate data from disparate systems into one fast and comprehensive planning and reporting solution.
Benefits
- Regular and timely monthly reporting with greater detail and visibility for line-of-business managers, senior directors and the Board of Directors.
- Easy integration with other systems to report on strategic merger and acquisition activities.
- The ability to perform complex modeling and forecasting, allocations and driver-based planning, enabling more accurate reporting on revenues and expenses by department.
IBM Cognos TM1 Helps Madison Square Garden Change Its Game
Coordinating and managing disparate data for a publicly traded, fully-integrated sports, entertainment and media business helps them truly manage the performance of their business.
“All the financial visibility and flexibility we need for our sophisticated approach to managing our business is much easier with TM1.”
Dimitrios Misantonis
Director of Financial Systems
Madison Square Garden
Challenge
With multiple operating divisions and a plethora of disconnected spreadsheets and disparate systems, MSG needed a financial budgeting and forecasting solution that could address its day-to-day needs and step up its performance for unanticipated events.
Solution
MSG selected IBM Cognos TM1 for its corporate planning and forecasting application and Revelwood to design and implement sophisticated models on the unified TM1 platform. Once installed and deployed, TM1 became the solution for bringing more visibility and flexibility to the company’s compensation models and overall revenues.
Benefits
- MSG’s divisions and units went from a five day monthly close to a much speedier monthly close process.
- The company, which employs a large number of people, can view, analyze and make decisions on compensation information down to the individual or entity level.
- Through sophisticated allocation models, MSG can truly understand its operating costs and impact on revenues.
- The success of embedding the breakout of Selling, General and Administrative and technical expenses to allow quicker analysis and reporting for the Form 10Q/10K.
Regency Energizes Budgeting and Reporting with IBM Cognos TM1 and Revelwood
A financial performance management solution with minimal IT resources for a publicly traded energy company significantly reduces man-hours spent on the budgeting process.
“Our monthly variance process is now substantially smoother. We’ve easily reduced our time spent budgeting by at least half.”
Tina Cone
Manager of Budgeting and Analysis
Regency Energy Transfer
Challenge
Regency had a long budgeting process, complicated by dealing with reports and budgets from more than 100 departments. In many cases the divisions had different formats and processes for budgeting. Relying on Excel resulted in version control issues, no central repository for budgeting information and an inability to collaborate. The cumbersome budgeting process offered little time or accurate data for in-depth analysis.
Solution
Regency selected IBM Cognos TM1 as a financial performance management solution for its finance department and many divisions. TM1 serves as a common platform for storing, monitoring and analyzing financial information across the company. Revelwood developed the models and cubes for the TM1 applications, taught the finance team to develop their own cubes and dimensions and trained the end user community on using the new TM1-based applications.
Benefits
- An estimated 50% reduction in man-hours spent on monthly budgeting.
- One consolidated solution for all budgeting data, delivering better consistency and transparency of data.
- A smoother budgeting process, eliminating version control issues.
- Empowers key team members with the skills and knowledge to develop new financial performance management applications.
- A foundation for rolling out financial performance management on an operational level to more than 100 departments and two different general ledger systems.
C Spire WirelessBudgeting, Planning & Reporting Makeover with IBM Cognos TM1 & Revelwood
Fixing an outdated, inefficient budgeting system for the largest privately held wireless provider in the United States provides fast, flexible reporting and ad-hoc analysis.
“Revelwood fit the bill perfectly. They have dozens of successful TM1 implementations under their belt, stellar references, and what I like to call their ‘bag of tricks’ – the pre-built models, templates and reports that dramatically reduced the overall implementation time and quickly improved our reporting efficiency.”
Brian Jones
Director, Financial Analysis and Planning
C Spire Wireless
Challenge
The company was using Excel spreadsheets and an old general ledger system that flowed into its financial reporting tool and had no functionality to create a comprehensive budget.
Solution
The use of Revelwood’s Lightspeed (formerly BPM Suite) and Dynamo! with IBM Cognos TM1 gave C Spire Wireless a powerful financial performance management solution that was up and running quickly and leveraged the best of TM1’s real-time OLAP functionality along with Revelwood’s best practices.
Benefits
- Greatly facilitates the company’s ability to produce dynamic, detailed budgets quickly and efficiently.
- Allows users to drill down to the details of what makes up each account line item.
- Frees the accounting department from the burden of having to manually look up invoices and play the role of gatekeepers.
- Provides employees with a transparency that gives them up-to-date information at any time and the ability to spot problems in advance.
- Offers fast, flexible reporting and ad-hoc analysis.