Oracle Analytics: Business Intelligence and Analytic Applications - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 52

competition but easy access to distribution channels, a fast reaction time
to an event may make a major difference to the bottom line. This informa-
tion float—the time it takes for information to wend its way up through
the channels to senior management—can be nearly eliminated by use of
this category of business intelligence software.
Once a significant variance is identified within a briefing book report,
the executive must be able to investigate the variance with much more
detail and from multiple perspectives. It's not enough to know that, at the
consolidated level, profits have deviated from the goal by 7 percent. Some
business units might be over this goal, and others might be well under the
goal. The executive must have some facility to answer questions such as:
What makes up the deviation? Is it a faltering distribution channel? Are
there competitive problems in an established product? Is it a failure in a
particular geographic area? In a particular product line? Or in one cus-
tomer grouping? To do this, a multidimensional knowledge base designed
to support the managerial perspective of financial performance must be
made available.
Brieing-topic information is a synthesis of information gathered from
the far-flung corners of an organization, often referred to as the financial
value chain . This includes processes from payroll, inventory, procurement
through process management, and ultimately into the decision-making
strategic-planning and forecasting-management set of processes.
Universal Studios Hollywood (USH), which is part of media and enter-
tainment giant NBC Universal, is an example of a company that is taking
advantage of software that enables automation of the financial value chain.
Universal comprises quite a few distinct businesses: operations, enter-
tainment, ticketing, food service, merchandising, maintenance, and real
estate management. They wanted to be able to easily do mission-critical
activities such as category and channel management, labor scheduling
optimization, and providing real-time visibility into their key perfor-
mance indicators (KPI). Like many companies, Universal was suffering
from fragmented data sources and practices across different business units.
Their goal was to transform their organization from one based on
spreadsheets and data gathering to one that spends 80 percent of its time
on analysis and 20 percent on data gathering. The company had already
invested in a data-warehouse solution to track ticketing information, but
wanted to add on robust budgeting functionality in order to quickly and
successfully do scenario modeling for 200 venues across seven businesses.
A BI system was implemented in 2002, along with an ERP solution that