FIDUCIA IT AG: Always on track

The full-service IT provider controls its business with SAS® Financial Intelligence

With some 3,450 employees, FIDUCIA is one of the largest full-service IT providers in Germany. The core business of the Karlsruhe-based company is providing IT services to 811 offices of Volksbank and Raiffeisenbank, the central institutes and companies in the cooperative financial association Genossenschaftlicher FinanzVerbund and private banks. The FIDUCIA Group's clients also include public administrations and industrial enterprises, as well as insurance companies.

The Task
In the field of controlling, FIDUCIA has always taken a strategic approach. A few years ago, the IT provider developed a strategic company-wide reporting system enabling detailed mapping and classification of processes and company objectives. In the monthly cycle, the solution provided information on the extent to which company objectives were attained – both from the perspective of the whole company and from the standpoint of the individual divisions and departments.

During its development, this solution was already a mature, innovative controlling instrument – yet eventually certain shortcomings appeared: for example, reports had to be input by hand with great efforts; SAP and Excel performance data had to be integrated manually. Another important point: the system allowed for only largely standardized monthly reports; central ad-hoc reporting and queries on general topics were possible only with great organizational effort.

Reasons enough for FIDUCIA to look around for a new solution: "We were looking for a controlling system that would give senior staff an overview of all the processes, objectives and risks, as well as costs and capacities – and link them with one another in order to enable forward-looking control of the company," says Lothar Schauer, Head of Corporate Control at FIDUCIA describing the tasks. "Flexible ad-hoc reporting for all specialized users was also on the list of requirements, along with ease of use without requiring special training."

Moreover, the new solution had to be able to integrate data from different data sources smoothly, as a result of the merger of FIDUCIA with rbg (Rechenzentrale Bayerischer Genossenschaften eG). "In the future, we also wanted to be able to integrate figures from financial controlling, in order to broaden the perspectives of corporate control.

That is quite easy to do with SAS," adds Lothar Schauer.

The Solution
Strong demands were placed on the new system, but the decision was made quickly: The controlling system would be built upon the SAS Financial Intelligence software suite. Under that one roof, SAS brought together all the necessary components for company-wide performance management: solutions for process cost analysis (SAS Activity-Based Management), integrated company control, and presentation of indicator systems (SAS Strategic Performance Management) and consolidation and planning of financial indicators (SAS Financial Management).

Not the least of the selling points for the world's biggest business intelligence provider was the diversity of functions of the SAS Performance Management Portfolios and first-class analytic capacities of SAS. Lothar Schauer explains: "No other solution lets us integrate so many indicators from different areas into controlling in such a powerful manner. Since we want to build up our system continuously, that is an especially important factor for us." Moreover, SAS scored points through its flexible OLAP technology, which allows new views of existing data, as well as making it possible for each division to carry out ad hoc analyses without the help of the IT department.

Lothar Schauer describes how the new system enhances the role of controlling: "With the new SAS-based control platform, it is now possible for controlling to act as an internal consulting authority in a fast, up-to-date and, above all, strategic manner. The controllers can meet their key challenges thanks to this system: enhancing added value, identifying cost drivers, and opening up new potentialities. "For example, employees have the possibility of playing through complex "what if?" scenarios and simulating what the company-wide effects would be. Drill-down can then be used to go more deeply into the data in order to identify causes and connections. The benefit of this to FIDUCIA is that the solution is extremely easy to use even for employees lacking extensive BI know-how.

The Benefits

• Strategic corporate control with a forward-looking view of all the processes, objectives and risks
• Transparency across divisions and departments with respect to status, objectives, services and costs of the company
• Controllers can function as strategic advisers and conduct ad hoc analysis themselves
• Consistent and reliable company-wide basis of information based on automatic data integration and quality assurance in a central data warehouse
• Drill-down to recognize the cause-and-effect relationships
• Integration of subsidiaries to achieve a consolidated view

The Project
In order to implement the project, FIDUCIA called upon an experienced business intelligence consulting firm: the Frankfurt-based NetCo Consulting, specializing in business management BI systems. Together FIDUCIA and NetCo worked out the specifications.

FIDUCIA attaches special importance to user-friendliness. For that reason, there was no question of extending the SAP system used in the CRM to controlling. The company had already experienced how difficult it is to run a solution that is acceptable to power users but very difficult for ordinary users. A system was therefore needed that could really be handled by all users with no problem.

After the decision was made in favour of SAS in January 2006, a project team made up of employees of FIDUCIA, NetCo and SAS started the planning and implementation of the new reporting solution. In the first project phase, SAS Strategic Performance Management was introduced. It was possible to maintain the usual basic reporting structure, enhanced by the numerous possibilities of analysis of SAS: Users have access to an intranet site that displays all the warning messages and trends to them clearly at a glance in a portal. The first level especially displays objectives and processes that have an especially high risk level or are in a critical range with respect to the targets.

From that starting page, individual standard reports or ad hoc reports can be retrieved: Are the production processes running smoothly or is there some urgent need for action? Which areas have unused capacities? Where are the overloads? Could the resources be balanced in that respect? These are only a few of the questions that can be answered with just a few mouse clicks thanks to the control platform of FIDUCIA.

In parallel, FIDUCIA began to implement a new SAS solution process cost analysis that can perform tasks ranging from overall calculation of overhead to consumption-oriented product calculation. In this respect, indicators are linked with capacities and processes, so that great transparency can be achieved in product management with respect to costs and prices – this enables a new, market-oriented awareness of resources and price structures. "We are continuing to build up our controlling system systematically," explains Lothar Schauer. "In this respect, process cost analysis plays a big role." Thus, FIDUCIA is obtaining manageable IT products with a transparent cost structure that can be adjusted at any time to meet the current needs and changing market conditions.

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