Case Studies

Dodeca Case Study - Cantor Fitzgerald
How Cantor Fitzgerald Increased User Productivity Using Essbase and Dodeca^®

Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the few remaining private partnerships on Wall Street, has the distinct ability to focus on long-term value creation and solid relationship building. Together with their affiliates, they operate trading desks in every major financial center in the world, with offices in 36 locations around the world and a dedicated team of approximately 1,400 employees. Cantor Fitzgerald wanted to standardize their analytic, planning and reporting environments to increase user productivity.

The Challenge

Cantor Fitzgerald was using Essbase with a number of user interface tools typically used in the industry. These tools included Hyperion Reports, Hyperion Web Analysis, Temtec Executive Viewer, the classic Essbase Excel add-in, Hyperion Smart View, Excel, and a standard query tool. Management was concerned that, with several proprietary BI paradigms, they were incurring high training costs to educate users and administrators on all the different tools. They were concerned that the confusing slew of screens, buttons, checkboxes and seemingly endless mouse clicks to get to information was not an optimal solution. They were also concerned that users would export their data into Excel where the users could properly analyze it.

The Evaluation Process

In evaluating their user interface options, management specified three must have features:

• Excel Functionality and Development Environment
• Single User Interface
• Ability to Use Their Business Rules and Processes

The user community depended heavily on the flexibility and the computational power of Excel, but getting data into, and out of, the spreadsheet was both time consuming and dependent on the skills of the Excel user. The familiar spreadsheet user interface, however, was a part of their daily life. Employees used spreadsheets because of the ability to use formulas and formatting, along with multi-tabbed workbooks, to add value in their Essbase databases and create the analyses they needed.

There were many different applications in use at the company. One way to streamline operations is to use a single product that is capable of delivering much functionality. This lessens the training requirements on employees with the added benefit of promoting proficiency in that product. The single product needed the functionality to be a one-stop-shop for accessing reports, performing analysis and drilling into the detailed transactions underlying the data.

Finally, Cantor Fitzgerald management wanted to keep many of the best-practice business processes they had developed in order to implement a software solution. Many software solutions bill themselves as best-practice solutions when, in reality, their concept of best-practices is a marketing term coined to cover for the inflexible nature of the software. An important evaluation criterion for Cantor Fitzgerald was to determine if the potential solution supported Cantor Fitzgerald best-practices.

The Solution

> Cantor Fitzgerald selected Dodeca as their single user interface. The Dodeca user interface looks and acts like Excel but is both easier to use and more flexible. The ease of use gives upper management the ability to view, and even create, their reports while the flexibility satisfies the needs of the financial analysts. The Intelligent Navigation feature of Dodeca allows users to explore Essbase data, and then jump to the underlying Oracle Financials detail with a single click. Intelligent Navigation saves users valuable minutes every time they access the general ledger and resulted in a payback time measured in weeks for some users.

Summary

Cantor Fitzgerald was able to eliminate the use of multiple reporting tools, reduce costs, and improve productivity without compromising the ability to manage their business. Users are able to explore their data moving from high level summary data all the way down to transaction level detail in a single, easy to use interface. Using Dodeca, employees at all levels within the company gain a better understanding of their business.

“We get a major bang for our buck with Dodeca. Our summary information is in Oracle Essbase but the detailed data is located elsewhere in our source operational systems. Dodeca is an extremely easy-to-use analytical tool that helps us very quickly drill down to the details necessary to gain full understanding of our business regardless of where the details are located. After our pilot, one of our analysts asked that if we weren’t going to license Dodeca, could he license it himself since it simplifies his job so much. Simply put, Dodeca helps us stay ahead of our competition.”

George Moorehouse
Director, Global Controller
Cantor Fitzgerald Securities