EPMware Success Story: Atradius

Background

With end-of-life on the horizon for Oracle’s Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA), trade credit insurance provider Atradius needed to find an alternative solution as quickly as possible with minimal disruption to its financial team’s day-to-day operations. Our partner inlumi, which supported Atradius with the upgrade to the 11.2 release of Oracle EPM, provided advisory services concerning possible solutions.

On top of EPMA being at end of life, Atradius was also looking into improving its metadata management processes, so it decided to look for a software-as- a-service (SaaS) solution that would solve both problems simultaneously.

Although it evaluated other solutions, Atradius selected EPMware because it met the company’s stringent requirements for fast implementation, ease of use, efficient metadata management, and SaaS delivery.

The Problem

EPMA’s end-of-life jump- starts the search for a more efficient metadata management solution.

Prior to implementing EPMware, Atradius’s finance team was utilizing Oracle’s enterprise performance management (EPM) platform with EPMA as its metadata management solution. The organization’s primary problem was that EPMA was no longer going to be included in the Oracle Hyperion tool set after the launch of EPM 11.2.

With EPMA’s end-of-life approaching, the team decided to look for a solution that would not only replace EPMA but also help the company solve an ongoing secondary issue simultaneously.

Requesting a change in the metadata required many manual interventions from different departments, making the process time-consuming and more prone to errors. Metadata requests were stored in SharePoint and users would manually add notes to request files about which systems created the metadata, what kinds of changes were made, and what the rules were regarding those changes.

Users would make a change request in SharePoint and then send emails to the appropriate people, explaining each metadata item and value set. These emails were then attached to the SharePoint form to justify the change.

Additionally, the team was doing a significant amount of manual work to support the data flow between systems, including Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and its Hyperion tools, as well as multiple source systems such as credit insurance, collections, and reinsurance.

Each of these systems created accounting transactions that were being dumped into EBS for consolidation or budgeting. These systems required manual intervention to transfer the data from one system to another because the mapping tables and consolidation rules were not consistent.

When he came across BrainStorm QuickHelp™, Russell thought he’d found a useful IT resource that could help ease the deployment. “We first looked at QuickHelp™ as a short-term training solution,” Russell admits. But when he learned that QuickHelp also provides a user-centric, personalized learning journey, “it became clear that it would become part of our long-term strategy.”

The Solution

EPMware transforms metadata management in days, not months.

Originally, Atradius thoroughly evaluated Oracle DRM Lite (the free version) as a replacement for EPMA. However, the restricted functionality of this version— specifically its lack of direct integration with target systems and lack of the ability to read and feed from source systems—made it unsuitable for use.

Atradius valued time, cost-effectiveness, and ease of implementation for this initiative, looking for an out-of-the-box solution rather than a product that would require significant amounts of custom configuration.

EPMware turned out to be the perfect fit. EPMware’s fast, efficient implementation required little technical effort for the Atradius team to migrate its metadata from EPMA to EPMware. After upgrading to 11.2, the applications automatically went into “classic mode” and were fully imported to EPMware with its one-click import capability. The Atradius team was also impressed by EPMware’s ease of use from day one, with minimal training required.

EPMware was ready to use out of the box. But when Atradius requested a few functional validations to replace some of its manual processes, even these were configured within days. Our implementation partner, inlumi, has supported EPMware in its EPM journey for many years. Technical knowledge and a good understanding of the client’s needs lead to an efficient project—20 days from start to finish, a timeline not commonly heard of in the financial system transformation space.

The Results

EPMware delivers accurate, accessible, centralized metadata management.

Atradius needed to deploy a new solution quickly with minimal downtime, so EPMware worked with inlumi to deliver
a seamless implementation. inlumi is a global team of over 250 specialists in digital transformation for the office of the CFO, including advisory, technology implementation, and managed services.

EPMware’s technical validation capabilities automatically translated Atradius’s metadata during the installation, which would have required hours of manual effort with DRM.

Unlike Atradius’s previous metadata management process, EPMware automatically harmonizes hierarchies across all systems and applications, with little manual intervention required. Using built-in mapping capability, users can create a central metadata repository and links that allow information to be easily transferred between systems, so there is no question as to whether the data is accurate or up to date.

EPMware’s code-free integration capabilities and plug-and-play adapters also allow Atradius to future-proof the company’s metadata management strategy. With all metadata centralized and accessible across all systems, the next time a critical tool reaches its end-of-life, EPMware adapters will seamlessly deploy the metadata to the replacement solution and keep all systems synchronized.