• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Companies Turn to Enterprise Performance Management Solutions from Business Objects to Help Maximize Profitability and Contain Costs in Economic Downturn

Posted on: Monday, 15 December 2008, 08:00 CST

PALO ALTO, Calif. and WALLDORF, Germany, Dec. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Business Objects, an SAP company (NYSE: SAP), today announced that both SAP and non-SAP customers worldwide are continuing to embrace its enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions, relying on the BusinessObjects(TM) Profitability and Cost Management application to remain competitive and atop their respective markets during uncertain economic times. BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management is a proven application that helps business users improve financial performance by providing deeper insight into cost drivers and their impact on profitability.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050310/SFTH009LOGO-a)

Customers worldwide and across varied industries are all using profitability and cost management software from Business Objects to retrieve the information they need to conduct better cost analyses and pinpoint where they are profiting or losing money. With a more holistic picture of their cost drivers, these customers can make more well-informed business decisions. Customers include AmeriHealth Mercy Family of Companies, Guardian Life Limited and CUMIS Group, as well as Chaucer-a company receiving industry-analyst award recognition for its implementation of BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management.

Guardian Life Limited, a Member of the Guardian Holdings Group, Relies on Business Objects to Accurately Predict Business Costs and Improve Strategy Moving Forward

Since deploying BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management in 2006, Guardian Life Ltd., a major player in Jamaica's life insurance, health and pension industry, has used the application exclusively for its performance-optimization needs over the past two financial years.

Guardian Life's executives, department heads, cost-center managers and those overseeing profitability margins all access financial data from the organization's backend Oracle system through the Business Objects application in order to accurately assess the implications of business decisions on predefined targets. The application also enables Guardian Life Ltd. to significantly reduce the number of manual processes while compiling these analyses.

"Profitability and Cost Management helps our cost-management team to better understand and manage costs and enables us to run important sensitivity analyses," said Doyle Simon, manager, Finance Planning and Expense Control (FPEC), Guardian Life Ltd. "Not only has this saved us time and money, it also makes it possible for us to better serve our customer base. Our parent company is constantly measuring us against stipulated performance metrics, and Business Objects helps us automate and deliver in a timely manner the reports we need. In the future, we plan to expand our use of Profitability and Cost Management to include our Employee Benefits systems so we can pass on benefits to our consumers."

CUMIS Group Enables End-Users to Drive Down into Details and Make Better Business Decisions

When using its old reporting system, financial-services provider CUMIS Group had limited insight into expense data. With five companies under its wing, CUMIS needed a more transparent reporting model, along with an activity-based costing (ABC) system that would help it to fairly allocate expenses across its companies and 70 lines of business and provide senior management with accurate insight into these costs. CUMIS selected Business Objects for its flexible, user-friendly ABC modeling, its customizable reporting and its ability to distribute data in a secure setting, which enabled CUMIS to work confidently with confidential information. As a result, CUMIS can now securely distribute and view expenses across operating departments and analyze data accordingly, allocating resources and expenses and gaining an improved picture of profitability.

Chaucer Wins Industry-Award Recognition for Successful Performance Management

Chaucer Syndicates Limited provides the capital and expertise required to underwrite insurance business at Lloyd's, the world's leading specialist insurance and reinsurance market. The scale, complexity and reporting demands of the financial market presented significant operational challenges and risks for Chaucer, which relied on a spreadsheet-based approach for information processing. Chaucer selected Business Objects to fulfill its needs for financial planning and forecasting, while providing timely, accurate and flexible information for decision-making and reporting. Today, Business Objects helps Chaucer save approximately 500,000 pounds Sterling in labor costs each year, reflecting the time, money and resources that are now freed up for other business-critical activities.

"Business Objects EPM solutions have helped us complete our planning, forecasting and reporting processes in less time and with fewer resources," said Mark Graham, Chaucer's chief financial officer. "For example, our planning process that collects data from 98 contributors now takes half the time it once did. The process now requires two-thirds less workload from our finance team and has eradicated the need for 200 spreadsheets. Similarly, our annual profitability and quarterly expense-forecasting process is now quicker, requires half the resources and has eliminated the need for multiple spreadsheets. Business Objects has enabled us to free up more of our resources, so they can be devoted to more strategic projects with greater value-add."

Chaucer was recently named a Ventana Research 2008 Leadership Award Winner in the Workforce Performance category for its use of Business Objects technology in advancing business and IT management. The Leadership Awards recognize pioneers that exemplify the understanding that successful performance management requires both a committed team and effective leadership. The program is designed to recognize organizations like Chaucer that have demonstrated how to commit resources to this critical undertaking and bring it to fruition.

"During times of economic downturn, it is even more critical for customers to adopt solutions that are laser-focused on improving their company's ability to succeed," said Stephanie Buscemi, vice president of Marketing, Enterprise Performance Management and Governance Risk and Compliance, Business Objects, an SAP company. "Critical to that is finding the right balance between containing costs and ensuring that cost-cutting measures do not compromise an organization's ability to maintain service levels and pursue fruitful business strategies. This is precisely why BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management is a uniquely powerful business application -- it provides managers with clear visibility into costs and an understanding of the sources of organizational profitability. As these customer success stories prove, customers are turning to Business Objects ahead of the other alternative products, to help make quick, informed decisions and shift strategies -- based on a more complete understanding of how overall corporate costs and profitability will be affected."

About Business Objects

Business Objects, an SAP company, transforms the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses. With open, heterogeneous applications in the areas of governance, risk and compliance; enterprise performance management; and business intelligence, Business Objects enables organizations of all sizes worldwide to close the gap between business strategy and execution. Together with a strong and diverse partner network, Business Objects allows customers to optimize business performance across all major industries including banking, retail, consumer-packaged goods and public sector. Business Objects is committed to helping customers turn raw data into actionable decisions, regardless of their underlying database, operating system, applications or IT system.

For more information about Business Objects, visit: http://www.businessobjects.com.

For more information about SAP, visit: http://www.sap.com.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

Copyright (C) 2008 SAP AG. All rights reserved.

SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects S.A. in the United States and in several other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serve informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

For customers interested in learning more about Business Objects products:

Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24 United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727) For more information, press only: Scott Behles, SAP, +1 (917) 494-2009, scott.behles@sap.com, EST SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EST; press@sap.com Kimberly Cole, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (312) 596-3415, kimberly.cole@bm.com, CST Nicole Urhahn-Schmitt, Burson-Marsteller, +49 (0)69 2 38 09-43, nicole.urhahn-schmitt@bm.com, CEST

SOURCE SAP

Source: PR Newswire

More News in this Category