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 Case Studies
Dodeca Case Study - US Bank
How US Bank Consolidated BI and Planning to Cut Costs and Improve User Productivity
U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB), with $266 billion in assets, is the parent company of U.S. Bank, the 6th largest commercial bank in the United States. The company operates 2,850 banking offices and 5,173 ATMs, and provides a comprehensive line of banking, brokerage, insurance, investment, mortgage, trust, and payment services products to consumers, businesses, and institutions. The company has approximately 60,000 employees and over 7,000 Dodeca® users.
Challenges
US Bank had critical operating data that resided in different data sources including:
- Essbase
- Oracle
- SQL Server
- Imaging System
Employees were using a variety of reporting tools to access the data including:
- Essbase Excel Add-in
- PDF Reports
- Microsoft Reporting Services
- Web Focus
- Excel Spreadmarts
The company had to serve a wide spectrum of end users including experienced financial analysts, with a view of overall bank results, and bank branch managers, just interested in the key performance indicators for their branch. Another challenge was to be able to satisfy requests to add new reports or modify existing reports without extensive turnaround time or cost. Finally, the bank wanted to use the same tool for reporting and analysis as well as planning applications, which required the ability to write back data to the database.
The Evaluation Process
Management focused on three key criteria in their selection process:
- One Stop Shopping for reporting, analysis, and planning. Hide the complexity to the end users as to where the data actually resides. Reports and analysis from Essbase, MS Reporting Services, and Web Focus as well as planning input templates should all have the same look and feel.
- The application must be fast and easy to implement with most of the functionality available out-of-the-box.
- The application must be highly configurable with standards based skills. They did not want to pay vendor proprietary technology “specialists” every time they needed an enhancement. The bank knew they had business rules and processes that were unique to their business and wanted the ability to implement them without unreasonable costs.
The Solution
US Bank selected Dodeca as their One Stop Shopping tool for reporting, analysis, and planning. It met all of the key criteria management had specified in the evaluation process. US Bank achieved a high ROI by using Dodeca.
- High out-of-the-box functionality led to low implementation costs.
- Non programmers could configure and administer the applications meaning low maintenance costs.
- Sophisticated everyday users and occasional non-financial users use the same UI which eliminated training costs for multiple different UI paradigms.
US Bank users take advantage of the my favorite’s reports functionality where users can save selected views to their personal favorite’s folder. The “drill to detail” is another very popular feature which allows users to drill from high level summary data, to general ledger detail data, to actual images of source documents all in the same UI.
Summary
In summary, the bank cut costs by eliminating a ineffective BI solutions and many home-grown rouge Excel branch reporting systems and increased user productivity by implementing a single, easy to use system for daily reporting, sophisticated analysis and planning.
“Applied OLAP’s Dodeca software provides the ideal combination of out of the box functionality and extensibility to meet our business demands. With Dodeca, my company delivers applications in a fraction of the time and cost of other solutions.
Dodeca gives users access to both Oracle Essbase and other data sources through a single integrated interface. This one-stop-shopping makes it both easy-to-use and useful.”
Chris Lynd
Senior Vice President
US Bank, N.A.
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