Company news
Case Study
Czech Aeroholding has implemented ApplStream
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Implementation of the ApplStream portal for Oracle E-Business Suite in Czech Aeroholding |
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CZECH AEROHOLDING and its sister companies have been using Oracle E-Business Suite for management and recording of finance, assets and purchases for a number of years. However the access to their information remained a challenge. CZECH AEROHOLDING’s IT department tested the ApplStream® solution with a number of key users, showing the superior advantages that it offered and as a result the decision was taken to purchase and implement ApplStream®. In the second half of 2010 user definition was started under the management of Josef Vesely - Application Administration Department Manager. After the annual operation review CZECH AEROHOLDING confirmed their satisfaction with a trouble-free and efficient operation which saved users phenomenal time when searching for information and creating reports. The next phase is to implement SQL Intelligent framework for which Czech Aeroholding will develop the portal independently from ATTEYA. Today ApplStream® receives more than 5,500 inquiries from CZECH AEROHOLDING’s individual users per month. |
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Application Administration
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AEGON has implemented the planning for Oracle EBS
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AEGON Insurance and AEGON Pension Fund have implemented ApplStream® BPL – Budget Planning with ORACLE E-Business Suite. |
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Companies of AEGON group in the Czech Republic extended their existing cooperation with ATTEYA Group in usage of the ApplStream® portal by the BPL – Budget Planning module this year. The initial state of budget planning and subsequent management of revenues and expenses in AEGON was almost exclusive use of the MS Excel environment and centralizing of planning in the financial controlling department. Details for planning with insurance technical data were delivered to controlling by insurance mathematicians, and cost of sales and administrative costs plans were primarily drawn up by responsible managers, owners of cost centres and then summarized in controlling into a form of reporting required by the group. An implementation and monitoring of a number of control elements were necessary for the requirement of maintaining correctness of input data during the whole process. With regard to the system of work with plans – creation of a basic plan in autumn of the previous business year plus up to four possible improvements of the plan upon ending current quarters – the existing process consumed not an insignificant portion of controllers working hours fund and all this also with taking account of regular budget evaluation and providing feedback to both responsible managers and the top management. Such solution was adequate to first years of functioning of both companies namely due to economic reasons. A significant share of manual work of a controller in the process of plan-making and subsequent evaluation thereof however became a limit to other activities of a controller in the course of time. The requirement for automation and higher efficiency of the budgeting process and management of revenues and expenses became topical. - direct relationship of a budgeted item and a defined part of an accounting chain, Although there is a lot of work ahead of us when preparing the 2012 budget, we believe that this investment means advancement in systematization of processes and improvement of controlling environment of both companies. We will be glad to share our practical experience in future. |
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Financial Director
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Finance Planning
ApplStream® BPL System for Financial Planning Integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite in KOMTERM.
After our experience with planning for 2010, when it came to light that the current system in its given form was not satisfactory, our Company started to consider a new shape of planning. The task given by the Company management was: to ensure a unified system for the plan setting with a uniform structure for all parts of the Company.
“There were two variants available”.
• To invest into the current management information system, which served for economic results reporting and for planning. This system served to the controlling team only due to a small number of licenses. The controlling department collected data from individual responsible persons in MS Excel and then re-entered data manually into this system. Such investment would be aimed at the system technology to make it accessible for a wider range of employees.
• To plan directly in individual modules of our Oracle EBS information system without the need of further investments. An obstacle for such a solution was the necessity to teach individual users up to four different procedures of plan entering depending on whether they would plan labour costs in the HR module, plan of repairs in the Service and Maintenance module, financial expenses in the General Ledger module and other expenses and revenues in the Project module. This appeared to be a too big problem, although modules have a common basis, namely a defined accounting string.
At that time ATTEYA Group introduced to us the BPL solution for finance planning. A reporting system ApplStream® of ATTEYA has been implemented in our Company two years ago and we have got very good experience with it.
The basic shape of the introduced BPL solution fulfilled our general requirements for planning, where structural elements of the system were:
– a budgeting item firmly linked to the accounting string (in our case it’s company–department–project–task–account–facility)
– the budgeting item description
– a user comment to individual budgeting item
– so called detailed item (a possibility to produce a further break down of budget item under the same accounting string)
– individual budget periods (a monthly period)
– access rights to data according to individual user groups (two levels of access – to individual plans and individual departments)
– plan versions
– Work Flow during an approval process
An interface between BPL and Oracle EBS with the help of API functions had to be designed for further use of plan information (alerts on exceeding the plan, information on budget utilization, …). The download of data is performed after a full completion of planning and approval of individual plans in BPL.
The structure of plans (rules limiting accounting strings) was defined and they were generated (according to responsibility for a specific area of planning), e.g. wage plan, overhead costs plan, utility costs plan, etc., during the implementation. Access rights were assigned to 50 users.
Upon generating the plan we found out that we could not use the current table of accounting strings combinations, so a new table with approximately 17 millions accounting string variations was generated based on rules set by the controlling department. An individual plan is created by generating a table, which contains only those accounting strings, which comply with defined criteria, e.g. labour cost plan contains only variations, which have class 52x cost accounts in their “account” segment.
It appeared during practical planning of 2011 that we used only approximately 100 thousand variations of accounting strings from this table, and so we will try to simplify the table for the next year. In our case the number of variations is caused by a wide organizational (= cost) structure and by a number of individual projects. The size of the table consequently influences the speed of final generation of plans, e.g. in the case of omission of some accounting strings.
The planning process for 2011 took approximately 3 months within the Company and can be considered a very successful.
Due to a simple use of the BPL and their knowledge of the current ApplStream® solution users had no problem to learn how to set the plan.
We managed to unify the structure of individual plans across all departments, plants and companies.
Currently we have planned data downloaded into four modules in Oracle E-Business Suite. In the General Ledger module they serve to us for comparing the plan and reality of financial statements (the profit and loss statement, the balance,…). In the HR module for comparing the plan and reality of labour costs. We have set evaluating reports above Projects and Service and Maintenance modules in the ApplStream® portal.
Article by: Ing. Hanka Ježková 
Head of Information Systems, KOMTERM, a.s.
ApplStream for FEZKO Thierry corp
Tuesday, 27 July 2010 19:17
An Efficient Reporting from a “Large” ERP Oracle E-Business Suite.
FEZKO Thiery concluded an implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite information system, which involves now all areas of the company from sales, engineering, manufacturing, project management via financials up to logistics and warehouses on November 1st 2008. Their existing reporting tools were not very efficient and every readjustment was very costly.
The Change Had to Come
Reporting within the new Oracle EBS information system was very lengthy and expensive. Reports were much single-purpose and every new variant or a change of existing report required unacceptable costs, says Mr. Radim Juchelka, Head of IT. We needed a tool for a swift, conceptual and operative reporting and for user produced arbitrary variants of reports without the necessity of expensive programming of new routines.
Why Specifically ATTEYA Group and Their Tool?
ApplStream® helped us to resolve a critical situation in the area of the new ERP system reporting at the final stage of implementation and commissioning. The impracticability of so called standard routines of ERP and a lengthy, cumbrous and costly creation of new routines was replaced by a flexible and fast reporting system working with production system data on-line and providing a tool for the creation of almost arbitrary variants of reports by the user himself.
Fast and Successful Implementation
The implementation of the ApplStream® portal took place basically “unknown to us” and “at a background”, Mr. Juchelka notes. We provided the documentation of the ERP solution, ATTEYA Group set up the selected module independently and remotely, this was followed by our testing and user training, writing up suggestions, implementation of suggestions in the portal and acceptance of the solution. The whole implementation took place completely trouble free and very fast.
The technical design of the whole solution has been drawn up as individual modules, similarly to ERP, with individual modules being actively interlinked. The DNA Technology, which is used by ApplStream is unique by the fact that it sets and optimises SQL queries sent to a server in an intelligent way. An instant response and return of a result or a report to the user’s screen make a great advantage. According to statistics this technology these days processes 92% queries within one second and only 2,3% exceeds one minute.
Mgr. Radim Juchelka
IT Manager, FEZKO Thierry a.s.
A Few Words on Behalf of the Supplier
I am very glad and I highly appreciate the confidence given to us and to our solution by the FEZKO management. We shall do our best for development of our cooperation and satisfaction of user’s requirements. I see this step as the beginning of cooperation with a top European manufacturer of fabric for an automotive industry.
Pavel Černý
CEO, ATTEYA Group, s.r.o.
KOMTERM Has Implemented ApplStream
Monday, 30 November 2009 19:17
ORACLE EBS – Each Employee Has to Manage Reports
In KOMTERM a.s., they have started using Oracle E-Business Suite information system since January 2008. Existing reporting tools indeed did not satisfy the requirement for making data available to a wide spectrum of users and were not flexible enough. A change was inevitable…
It was not easy to find a quality tool for browsing the Oracle EBS database, which would satisfy all. “At first we were looking about for Oracle technologies within the need to acquire a reporting system. Therefore we purchased the Oracle Discoverer product”, Hana Ježková, KOMTERM Head of information systems, says. That one was however too complicated. Hereat the most problematic area was the linkage among individual modules. “That was why we used the opportunity of ATTEYA Group, who offered us a test version of their technology”, Mrs. Ježková adds.
ApplStream® Has Proven Good
That was just the success of the test version of the ApplStream® solution which convinced KOMTERM representatives to approve its implementation. Thanks to this they had an information on links among individual documents in finance modules, purchasing and inventory available at KOMTERM immediately after an installation. On top of it, the environment was very friendly and easy to operate for common users.
The implementation project comprised 4 stages, whereas each stage involved a specific module, or rather factually related modules. Only a brief user training was needed, which described individual functionalities of wildcard search characters (e.g. the “%” known from Oracle) and saving of already produced reports including exports to Excel (a description of the portal toolbar). Users are able to set a report themselves and save it for further usage and to seek details of the whole string after such training.
Currently, an implementation of the 4th stage is under way, namely the setting of a completely new and the last module – Assets Service and Maintenance – which had not been offered by ATTEYA Group as a standard but it was created directly for the needs of KOMTERM.
Return on Investment? Excellent!
Final costs of the project were unexpectedly low with regard to the result and a concurrent on-line user support. This is related to an excellent return on investment. “We expect a very fast return on investment into this technology within the work efficiency of individual users and a fast access to information”, states Hana Ježková with satisfaction.
The contribution of the new system is first of all a fast and user friendly access to information across individual modules of Oracle EBS. KOMTERM now estimate that their rate of document processing errors has dropped by approx. 70%. The reason is mainly the fact that a user can check his / her work immediately.
