Situation
During the last five years, commercial and industrial organisations have had to respond to the increasing demand for financial transparency from government and regulatory bodies. The ability to provide up-to-date information, such as company-wide financial status, precise liquidity plans, and details of guarantees and liabilities, has become an unavoidable requirement for enterprises operating in global and international markets.
Nevertheless, many treasury departments continue to use spreadsheet solutions like Microsoft® Excel as a basis for their treasury reporting. They gather the basic data required for planning and reporting by sending and receiving countless spreadsheet files throughout the company. Such solutions are obviously inefficient. They lead to a high consolidation effort, are error-prone, and difficult to manage.
Clearly, meeting the demands for financial transparency is a significant challenge, which few organisations are ready to meet without additional investment in staff, processes, and technology. Disparate corporate IT environments and tough budget restrictions are severe barriers to company-wide collation and reporting of financial data. The need is for a solution that is economical, simple to implement, and efficient to operate.
Fortunately, such a solution is now available. Schwabe, Ley and Greiner GmbH is the leading German-speaking treasury consultancy based in Vienna. Founded in 1988, today the company has a staff of about 60 employees. Describing the business, Hubert Rappold, project manager at Schwabe, Ley and Greiner says: “Our company focuses on functional treasury
consulting. We offer expert financial guidelines and provide the practical tools with which to implement them. For the technical development of these tools, we turn to our partner cubido business solutions gmbh.”
cubido business solutions works at the forefront of component oriented software development, focusing on partnerships with ISV business partners to meet the specific needs of larger companies. It has been an Austrian Microsoft Certified Partner for four years. The company has a proven history of successful implementations based upon the early adoption of the latest Microsoft development tools.
Schwabe, Ley & Greiner’s typical customers are international enterprises, headquartered in German-speaking Europe, serving customers globally from offices throughout the world. As the demand for increased financial transparency grew, they turned to Schwabe, Ley and Greiner for help. Rappold recalls: “The old Microsoft Excel reporting solutions were no longer viable. Our customers needed enterprise treasury solutions capable of meeting their financial reporting obligations while providing added value throughout their operations. We decided to approach our partner cubido business solutions to develop it with us.”
Today more than 60 enterprises all over Europe are using Schwabe, Ley & Greiner’s web-based treasury reporting solutions. British American Tobacco Group is one example for a successful installation of the product. Frank Sternberg, European Treasury and SLG Project Manager at BAT Hamburg says: “SLG’s treasury reporting solution is an exceptional reporting tool and we think it is a powerful tool not only for the Group's Treasury Centre but also for the “endmarket”. We believe it is the way forward in order to standardise our treasury cash flow reporting worldwide. We must not forget that this is the first reporting tool for treasury information standardisation, which BAT Group is actually adopting”.
Solution
cubido business solutions’ concept for the solution was simple, as Rainer Stropek, Founder and General Manager, explains: “We wanted a Web-based solution that would allow a central treasury department to define master data, manage user access, and define the process of data collection. We also wanted to eliminate the need for consolidation before the creation of treasury reports, by storing data directly into a central database.”
He continues: “Our vision was of a fully browser-based environment that allows users across an enterprise to submit financial data directly and easily using a simple interface that helps them to concentrate on content rather than the tool itself.”
cubido business solutions chose the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 as the development environment for the project and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 to provide the data layer backend. The .NET Framework is an integral component of Microsoft Windows® operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
Stropek explains: “We chose the .NET Framework because of its unequalled support for the development of Web solutions and object-oriented design methodologies. SQL Server™ 2000 enables us to implement the business constraints and logic entirely within the database. With this approach, we enhance security, performance and, most importantly, the solution’s functional range.
“In particular, Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft Visual C#® .NET 2003 enable the quick development of browser-based solutions using Web Services and forms to deliver the rich application layer, which, unlike solutions built using Java Applets and ActiveX controls, requires no client-side components.”
For Rappold, a key design goal for Schwabe, Ley and Greiner was that the solution should be customisable and easy to tailor to the unique needs of each customer: “We want to go beyond the renaming of fields in lists and forms. Our objective is to give business consultants and end users, people with no technical expertise, the facility to change the layout of the whole application, if necessary, to meet the precise business requirements.”
The cubido business solutions development team achieved this goal by designing and implementing the DMS (Data Management System). Stropek provides the detail: “The DMS is an extremely flexible list and forms engine. Completely metadata driven, it sits above the ASP.NET Web control logic. It allows consultants and end users to disable, enable, and rearrange columns and fields and alter their properties, such as colour, required-flag, and format. Additionally, DMS uses Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services to allow users to export the output from reports in .xls and .pdf formats.”
Developments in progress include enabling integration with external systems. Rappold confirms the commitment: “Schwabe, Ley and Greiner recognise that incoming and outgoing interfaces to external enterprise systems are very important to its customers and, to this end, we are deploying one of the most powerful integration tools available on the market: the Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004.”
Benefits
Efficient Partnership Collaboration
While partnerships support the exploration of new markets and the development of new business opportunities, to work effectively there must be clear understanding between the parties about how they will work together. It takes time to establish these working practices, yet, without them, the potential mutual benefits can remain elusive or be lost through inefficient role definition and separation.
The .NET Framework made it easy for cubido business solutions and Schwabe, Ley and Greiner to avoid such pitfalls. Stropek explains: “The flexibility of the .NET Framework means that our developers can concentrate on the technical problems, leaving the resolution of the specific business issues to the consultants at Schwabe, Ley & Greiner.
Rappold confirms this: “The new methodologies, facilitated by the .NET Framework, made it easy for us to separate our efforts. cubido focuses on application development; we concentrate on configuring the solution to fit each client’s business process. Using cubido’s Data Management System interface, we decide details such as the layout of fields, which fields are mandatory, and what type of data they require.”
Flexible, Fast Application Development
Using the earlier Microsoft Active Server Pages development technology, cubido business solutions found it difficult to create solutions that could be easily modified or tailored. By contrast, the .NET Framework provides a flexible environment in which developers can code discrete blocks of functionality, which they can combine in different ways to create customised Web solutions.
Stropek confirms the benefit: “The important thing for us as developers is that the .NET Framework makes it possible to use new object-oriented programming methodologies. This means we can exploit Web Parts and the Web controls of Microsoft ASP.NET to create building blocks for Web applications. Using these, we can quickly construct customisable Web-based solutions to provide the functionality required.”
High Productivity, Error-free, Fast Treasury Reporting
For many large companies, treasury reporting continues to be an inefficient process, depending on Excel templates, central consolidation, and macros to create the reports required. It is a slow, resource-hungry, error-prone process, often complicated by inconsistent software versions, incorrect data entry, and manual copy-and-paste techniques during consolidation.
The new .NET Framework solution has eradicated all these problems, as Rappold confirms: “It is no longer necessary to distribute templates, as data is entered directly into the system online. This reduces the duration of the whole process by many days, ensures correct data entry initially, and avoids errors that arise during consolidation. The final reports are available sooner, they are more accurate, and they can be easily re-run whenever necessary.”
Increasing the Value of Data Across the Business
Previously, the consolidated data produced by treasury departments from the subsidiaries’ returns was not easily accessible elsewhere in the business for use in other processes. Now, the export capabilities of SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services, exploited by the DMS, allow the data to be widely used.
Stropek explains how: “With just one click, customers can use the cubido DMS to export data from the Web application in a variety of commonly used formats, such as .pdf, .xls, and .doc. What’s more, they do so knowing that the embedded rules applied by the Web application when the data was gathered ensure it is accurate and consistent.”
Rappold confirms the business benefit: “We can take advantage of the tight synchronicity between SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003. By making the data easily available to users throughout the business, in a format that is compatible with the productivity tools familiar to them, we are giving them greater commercial insight and significantly increasing the value of the data gathered by the treasury application.”
Intelligent Reporting Improves Access to Data
In the past, the quantity of data gathered by the treasury department posed challenges to users looking for specific details. There was no quick and easy way to access or drill down into the data. The cubido DMS, developed within the .NET Framework, allows Schwabe, Ley and Greiner to offer its customers customisable output forms to manage their reports.
Rappold is enthusiastic about the improvements in reporting he can offer his customers: “Our customers have to deal with huge amounts of data each day. The new solution gives them quick and efficient access to the specific details they need. By defining their search filter using a choice of criteria and the per-column sort functionality to manipulate the results, they can find what they need in minutes, if not seconds, compared to hours previously. This is only possible because of the new capabilities SQL Server 2000 and the .NET Framework have delivered.”
Customised Solutions Tailored to Business Needs
One of the main challenges Schwabe, Ley & Greiner faces from its customers is the demand for solutions that meet their specific needs by reflecting corporate standards and business processes. In the past, it was difficult to achieve the customisation required to satisfy such requirements.
Rappold is delighted that the new Web-based treasury solution, developed using .NET technologies, has removed these restrictions: “Now we have a very easy way of providing a customised solution to meet each customer’s specific needs. We can respond immediately to customers’ requests to alter the look and feel, layout, and content of screens to reflect their individual working practices. They can even make these changes for themselves.”
Improved Performance and Security
“By developing the entire application in the .NET Framework, we have achieved great improvements in performance compared to the earlier solution,” says Stropek. “Not only is the system faster in operation, but it delivers far richer functionality without any further investment in infrastructure.”
Another performance benefit results from the ability the .NET Framework delivers to define a highly granulated rights structure, as Rappold explains: “Using very fine controls, imposed at an individual or user group level, we can secure the availability of each action in the user interface, such as menu options and buttons, to suit the individual circumstances of each customer’s business. In doing so, we create a user environment tailored to their role.
Rappold is confident that the benefits are set to continue into the future: “The cubido team are planning developments using the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 orchestration capabilities that will allow our customers to improve integration with existing enterprise solutions. By creating a standard interface technology that can be embedded into any kind of enterprise application, they will enable our customers to build ever more complex integration scenarios to extend the value of the treasury solution further still.”
Overview
Customer profile
Schwabe, Ley and Greiner GmbH is the leading German-speaking consultancy based in Vienna offering functional treasury consulting to global enterprises. It specialises is providing expert financial guidelines and the practical tools with which to implement them.
Business challenge
For the many companies still using simple spreadsheets to manage their financial reporting, satisfying the growing demands for financial transparency is becoming increasingly difficult. The process is often error-prone, difficult to manage, and requires a time consuming, resource-hungry consolidation effort.
Solution
Schwabe, Ley and Greiner GmbH, in partnership with cubido business solutions, has developed a Web-based solution that facilitates the local submission of financial data directly into a central database and centralised control of the data collection and reporting processes.
Benefits
• Flexible, fast application development.
• High productivity, error-free, fast treasury reporting.
• Increased value of treasury data.
• Intelligent reporting, improved access to data.
• Customised solutions tailored to business need.
• Improved performance and security.
Software and services
Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
Microsoft ASP.NET
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004
Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services
Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003
Web Services
Partner
cubido business solutions gmbh