IXIS
“The integration of BusinessObjects Finance and BusinessObjects Planning enables significant time savings—as soon as a consolidation has run in one application, data is accessible in the other.”
Anne-Cécile Hondeville, VP IT/IS Manager, IXIS Asset Management Group
Challenge: Changing Market
IXIS Asset Management (AM) Group is the global asset management arm of Natixis. Based in Paris, IXIS manages €433 billion worth of assets for clients in Europe, Southeast Asia, and America. The company’s primary objective is to optimize the performance of its clients’ financial and real estate assets.
In 2000, IXIS AM Group was using a tool for statutory consolidation and a multidimensional market tool for financial planning and analysis (FP&A). Acquiring the firm Nvest in 2000, IXIS inherited an additional financial application. The Group encountered problems consolidating data from these three disparate applications, so a year later it opted to use BusinessObjects™ Finance for FP&A, consolidation, and reporting. The first “live” BusinessObjects Finance consolidation deployed in March 2003. The web-based solution facilitated decentralization, the involvement of all subsidiaries, and information traceability capabilities. BusinessObjects Finance enables consolidation of real data and also of budget and annual forecasts.
“Up until the beginning of 2006, our five-year business plan was created in Excel using the dynamic links offered by BusinessObjects Finance. But with 90 tabs, it was becoming unwieldy,” explains Anne-Cécile Hondeville, vice president of IT and information systems at IXIS.
Approach
To make its five-year plan more reliable, IXIS AM Group chose to complement its consolidation and reporting tool, BusinessObjects Finance, with BusinessObjects Planning. Previously IXIS used spreadsheets for plan creation but as the group grew, the spreadsheet model became overly restrictive. The Group now benefits from a unified system based on a single database. The key benefits of the combined solution are reliability, speed, and transparency.
Reducing the risk of errors caused by Excel’s limits was not the only objective set out by the IXIS AM Group Finance Department. It was also particularly keen for subsidiaries to become more involved in strategic planning. It was therefore essential for the solution to make strategic plan data available to everyone, so subsidiaries could then develop their five-year plans in the long-term, and the Finance Department could access this strategic information rapidly.
BusinessObjects Planning attracted Hondeville’s attention in 2005, and one year later, in September 2006, the application went into production. IXIS AM Group uses BusinessObjects Planning to create its strategic five-year plan, and everyone can access it in complete security. “Given its integration with BusinessObjects Finance, it was simply the ideal solution,” explains Hondeville. “Given the specific parameters of our project and our need to have a consolidated view of our data, it was absolutely essential that the data processed in BusinessObjects Planning could be downloaded in BusinessObjects Finance (and vice versa). BusinessObjects Planning was therefore the natural complement to BusinessObjects Finance.”
Results
“The integration of BusinessObjects Finance and BusinessObjects Planning enables significant time savings—as soon as a consolidation has run in one application, data is accessible in the other,” notes Hondeville. “We can construct and modify assumptions, and communicate results to Management almost instantly.”
Although the IXIS AM Group five-year plan is still created centrally, in the future, all subsidiaries will create and then send their data using BusinessObjects Planning. Hondeville continues to be enthusiastic, saying, “The aim is to train all subsidiaries so that they can enter their strategic plans using the template that we will have gone through with them.”
The BusinessObjects Finance-BusinessObjects Planning duo makes the five-year plan of one of the world leaders in asset management more reliable. Hondeville says. “We now have a completely unified system with one single database. We can be sure that BusinessObjects Finance and BusinessObjects Planning data are homogeneous and fully traceable,”
Quick Facts
- Industry:
Asset Management - Business pain :
iXIS needed to consolidate and integrate data from disparate applications, ensure data reliability, and update a rolling five-year plan as necessary. - Why Business Objects?
Integrated solutions from Business Objects compose a unified system offering with great update flexibility, reliable data, and a transparent strategic planning process. - Business Objects software and services:
BusinessObjects Finance, BusinessObjects Planning