An agile sprint for financial data

The client’s finance department was using standard SAP reports which limited the flexibility to slice and dice data or add fields to reports. Modifying or creating new reports was either difficult or expensive. Top management, including the CFO and financial controllers, were finding it difficult to create a high-level, integrated view of the company’s finances. The existing process required data transposition between various systems, including the SAP and Oracle systems. Much of this data was extracted and consolidated manually, which was time-consuming, and took around a week.

Iris executed a distributed Agile framework for the client’s global delivery model. Our solution pulled data out of the client’s SAP ERP system using Dell Boomi adapters, and leveraged SSIS (SQL server integration services) to transform it into enriched data. This data was mapped and made actionable through interactive PowerBI Tableau dashboards. With the help of a custom-made finance data model, a data warehouse was created. The easily shareable data cubes not only replaced all legacy reports, but also reduced the number of SAP user licenses.

With the availability of Power BI dashboards and the capability to slice-and-dice financial data, client managers now have a better view of operations and accounting flows. The data consolidation allows users to create need-based reports without additional licenses. The automation of the entire process from data extraction and transformation to publishing of analytical cubes has enabled the client teams to significantly reduce time required to produce reports – from days to a few minutes. They have been able to achieve a 95% reduction in time and effort.