Gaining a Competitive Edge
Continued
Building It from the Ground Up
Eaton Vance worked with Boston-based Palladium Group, an Oracle Certified Advantage Partner, to teach its IT staff how to build the application and business logic. “If we ever needed to make changes, we didn’t want to have to call anybody,” explains Pannella. “We wanted to build the skill set here.” After six months of application building, Eaton Vance spent another nine months doing data conversion and testing. “That meant literally going through three years of [data] history,” says Pannella. “We wanted to convert three years before we even went forward. And it was not only getting the data right but getting the consolidation rules right, because the company’s legal entity structure changed over time, and it took a little while to calibrate it,” says Pannella. It helped that he had strong executive sponsorship and 100 percent buy-in from both the finance side and the IT side, and that everyone was realistic. “There were sane timelines and reasonable expectations,” he says.
The company went live with the software in February 2006, and despite the complexity of the implementation, it’s been running ever since without a single moment of downtime, says Pannella. “We haven’t had a blip, even though it’s literally only two people supporting three fairly large applications,” he says. “And that’s two people who have other facets to their jobs as well.” At the same time, Eaton Vance has extended the software beyond the finance group into distribution channel reporting and analysis.
This result, says O’Connell, is comparable to what other financial firms are likely to see when they move to an automated BI implementation. “When you give employees this type of tool, productivity improves, which enables you to grow,” he says. “When you automate BI, you can endure some attrition even as your company grows, so even if you’re increasing revenues, you can keep some of your operating costs flat, even though you’re getting more out of your people and data.”
Real Sales Intelligence
BI also helps salespeople up-sell and cross-sell better, says O’Connell, and it helps with customer retention. “You’re increasing the amount of revenue per customer, which is a big deal because if you get more revenue from that existing customer, it’s purely new revenue—you don’t have to spend more money to make more money,” says O’Connell.
BI software can reveal trends that analysts might not see on an Excel spreadsheet, and because everything is automated, it can make the trends visible in real time. This means that if a shareholder starts making transfers from equity products to highly rated corporate bonds, the BI application can send an e-mail alert to a salesperson who can call the customer directly and suggest specific funds. This increases customer loyalty.
Such improvements are having a real impact on Eaton Vance employees, says Pannella. Adoption of the tools has been very high, and the company has now been able to roll out the solutions to all of its subsidiaries.
“At the end of the day, associates and management are all looking at the same thing. They’re all using the same hierarchies. They’re all talking the same language. You don’t have people doing pivot tables off trial balances and coming up with different answers,” he says. “We have a saying here at Eaton Vance: ‘Tell me what time it is. Don’t tell me how to build a watch.’ People are not enamored of the whizbang. They just want their data. They love their data. Their attitude is, ‘Get me the information I need to do the job right, and don’t make it a huge process to get it.’ That’s what we’ve been able to do. It’s been a huge, huge win.”
For More Information
Oracle Hyperion
Financial Services Applications
Karen J. Bannan is a freelance writer based in New York.
