Customers

Chicago Mercantile Exchange

Chicago Mercantile Exchange"When we first deployed our enterprise business intelligence (BI) and performance management platform, we finalized our budget process sooner than we ever had before, because now we had a good, efficient, integrated tool to use."

Andy Banas
associate director of data warehouse and telecom systems
Chicago Mercantile Exchange

Challenge

As the world's largest futures exchange, Chicago Mercantile Exchange's (CME) average daily trades are valued at more than $3 trillion. Composed of nine divisions - each with its own set of business technologies and methodologies - CME's business data grew exponentially in five years, from 5 to 250 terabytes.

CME struggled to manage disparate internal data, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and trade activity systems, as well as leverage a wide range of external data sources, including Internet feeds and subscriber services such as Bloomberg.

"We were classically inefficient," says Andy Banas, associate director of data warehouse and telecom systems at CME. With its silos of information, the company had trouble reconciling data and answering basic business questions. "We could create a hundred product lists, but not a single, definitive one," says Banas. "And the same difficulty applied to other types of information, like vendor lists. We didn't have that single version of the truth."

Approach

CME had previously considered enterprise information system projects, but with terabytes of data bearing down on the Internet technology (IT) department, CME had to make decisions - fast. With the primary goal of establishing solid reporting as well as strong financial and business analysis, CME evaluated leading BI solutions.

Selecting BusinessObjects™ XI (later upgrading to Release 2) and related Business Objects products, including Web Intelligence®, Dashboard Manager, and Performance Manager, CME conceived and implemented its enterprise BI and performance management platform within just six months.

With BusinessObjects established as the primary technology in its enterprise system, CME knew it was onto something immediately. "We call our enterprise platform InfoSource - the source of all information," says Banas. "We went from having something like over 25 different reporting platforms to one. Now everyone from all the divisions, including the finance group, uses InfoSource."

Results

Before deploying Business Objects, CME endured lengthy report development times and data reconciliation issues. Now, users create their own reports using Web Intelligence, or access information through a dashboard. Where every group used to have its own reporting effort, says Banas, "now all those groups defer to the InfoSource reporting platform - primarily driven by Business Objects."

According to Banas, Business Objects has transformed the way CME does business. CME doesn't just enjoy more efficient reporting and analysis, but the resources that used to be dedicated to those efforts are freed up to focus on the business. "People are finding tremendous value - they have greater insight into information, greater control over their reporting capabilities, they're more productive, and they're more efficient," says Banas. "In the past they had to wait for IT, and the time to market was in many cases extremely poor. Now, with InfoSource - and Business Objects - the power of information is directly in the hands of those who need it."

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