Industry:

Business Equipment

Size:

133,500 employees

Tenure:

7 years as a Datawatch customer

Challenge:

Transform Oracle Finance’s stagnant-text based reports and PDFs into data that can be analyzed, combined with data from other systems, and turned into more dynamic, usable reports.

Monarch Report Analytics Platform:

Monarch desktop

Few companies attain the level of Xerox (NYSE: XRX). Not only is the company an icon of American business, but Xerox also saw its name become a verb, an honor reserved for such classic organizations as Kleenex, Coke and Google.

Today’s Xerox focuses on document management as much as on its eponymous copy machines printers and multi-function units. But for information about its supply chain and logistics, the company’s 133,500 employees count on another mainstay of American business: Oracle.

As an accounting manager, Brian Kells-Murphy faced the problem of getting information from Oracle Finance’s stagnant text-based and PDF reports, into something more usable. Specifically, he needed data associated with the company’s Latin American international shipments.

“Oracle has nice reports, but you can’t do anything with them,” he says.

For six-months Kells-Murphy and his team attacked the problem, at one point bringing in an outside consulting firm and paying as much as $80,000, all to try to pull information from Oracle and put it directly into a more usable format. Nothing worked.

The final piece to an Oracle implementation is getting the necessary reporting. Since this couldn’t happen, the roadblock kept Xerox from realizing the true value of the full implementation. This was especially true with the receivables implementation, which proved to be a particularly tough module.

“It’s tough to cut and paste some of these reports, especially those that wrap around,” he said. “We really need to get the data and put it into a useful format. We struggled with that.”

Finally, a Xerox employee who used to work directly for Oracle Finance suggested that Kells-Murphy look at Monarch by Datawatch, since it’s the same system that Oracle uses to get access to its own information. He gave it a try.

In less than 2-weeks not only was Xerox up and running with Monarch, but Kells-Murphy immediately started getting access to the information he needed. What’s more, having the information was only part of the automation. With Monarch he could retrieve it, process it in Excel and send it directly to the Latin American distribution customers, all within minutes.

Monarch runs on the desktops of about 50 employees, enabling them to build their own models and pull their own information from reports. This self-service model empowers employees to examine and explore information in new ways, creating new opportunities for growth an expansion.

In addition to pulling information directly from the system and putting it into a usable format, the Xerox employees can now blend reports or filter information to create several different uses for a single dataset. “Some users get very creative with that,” Kells-Murphy says with pride.

The final reports can tell him anything from margin analysis to credit exposure to accrual writeoffs. They also contain inventory information, account distributions and purchase price variance. In most cases Kells-Murphy and his team are looking for something very specific: supporting detail for accounting entries; a factor that has become ever more important thanks to strict regulatory guidelines.

Over the years Monarch has become much more popular within the Xerox environment. What started with just a handful of people has grown into a team of 50, all using Monarch to turn data into intelligence.

Monarch has also moved far beyond the initial Oracle Finance module and now helps derive value from other Oracle products, including Oracle Fixed Assets, Order Management, General Ledger, Inventory, Purchasing, Accounts Payable, iStores and number of others.

Today, users save millions of dollars in time and effort pulling information from Oracle Finance and moving it to Excel or even Microsoft Access. In fact, some reports get created in just minutes, leading people to look at challenges and ask actively “can this be a Monarch application?”

More often than not, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

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About Datawatch Corporation

Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) empowers organizations to transform the massive amounts of information that is trapped in static reports, PDF files, text files and other content-rich, but difficult-to-use data sources, into a dynamic information analytics system that accelerates and improves decision-making throughout their operations. Datawatch’s technology allows its tens of thousands of customers worldwide to leverage the investments they have made in reports from ERP, CRM and other custom applications into high performance analytic information at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional approaches. Datawatch is headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts with offices in London, Sydney and Manila. Datawatch has partners and customers in more than 100 countries worldwide.