WebFOCUS Streamlines Financial Reporting for Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

BI and Information Management Solution Enables Fast, Efficient Reporting in New J.D. Edwards Environment

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the country’s third largest Native American tribe, with more than 200,000 members around the world. With more than 6,000 employees, the Choctaw Nation is also the largest employer in southeast Oklahoma.

As its own nation, Choctaw serves as a fully functioning government with a citizen registry to keep track of members and services, such as healthcare, education, emergency services, and public safety. The Choctaw Nation’s rich history dates back hundreds of years, but the combination of rapid business growth and expansive government services inherent in its structure have made timely and informed decision-making increasingly difficult to achieve.

“When we had to retire an old accounting application, we saw the opportunity to build a long-term replacement using our new business intelligence foundation,” says Dustin Stark, IT director for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

With the help of Information Builders, the Choctaw Nation’s IT team developed a business intelligence (BI) and information management solution that enables them to report efficiently against their new J.D. Edwards accounting environment and develop reports and dashboards in a fraction of the time it once took. These benefits, combined with an increase in the efficiency and accuracy of accounting practices, has provided the Nation with a 300 percent return on its investment and saved several hundred thousand dollars.

The improvements realized under the new system have been so profound that the Nation now plans to deploy analytic applications throughout the enterprise to support everything from day care centers to casinos.

Freeing the Data for Real-Time Analysis

Choctaw Nation’s initial objective with its new BI solution was to facilitate better reporting for the finance team. During a previous data migration – from a SunGard IFAS system to a J.D. Edwards financial system on an IBM AS/400 computer – a lot of important information had been intentionally left behind. As support for the legacy platform underlying the SunGard system became harder to come by, the IT department had to find a stable alternative to keep the data accessible for the foreseeable future.

During a vendor RFI process, the Choctaw Nation team discovered Information Builders’ WebFOCUS for J.D. Edwards, a set of tools that provides all the power and functionality of the standard WebFOCUS BI platform but is optimized for J.D. Edwards applications. The Information Builders team demonstrated how easy it is to generate complex reports from J.D. Edwards and many other data sources, and then visualize the results in HTML, Adobe PDF, XML, spreadsheets, and other formats. Impressed with its potential, Choctaw Nation purchased WebFOCUS.

“It was clear that WebFOCUS for J.D. Edwards was the best solution for our needs,” says Stark. “Information Builders offered the strongest J.D. Edwards integration, providing an ease of implementation and report development we had not seen with other solutions. We are also incredibly pleased with the fact that WebFOCUS is versatile enough to provide a reporting mechanism to unlock data trapped inside a legacy system, allowing us to standardize on WebFOCUS for the reporting needs of both systems.”

Seamless Integration and Migration of Financial Data

Mike Everson, ERP support manager for the Choctaw Nation, says he was running test reports just a few hours after the BI software had been installed. “Information Builders’ native adapter integrates directly with the J.D. Edwards security model and data dictionary,” he says. “It references the metadata to properly format the data and insert it into the correct fields. This tight level of integration makes everything so much easier.”

Without these robust data mapping capabilities, Everson would have had to write, define, and convert every field in the J.D. Edwards system into a format that could be used for reporting purposes. “The WebFOCUS adapter uses JDE’s UDC descriptions, which simplifies the entire process,” he explains. “We just grab the data, and everything is easier from there on out. Tight integration with the J.D. Edwards applications permits a whole new level of reporting and analyses.”

Next, the team converted the data trapped in their previous enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into a Microsoft SQL Server database, using WebFOCUS to recover the reports that they deemed most necessary. Much to the delight of the business stakeholders, some of the new WebFOCUS reports included functionality that they had long desired but were unable to create with the previous system.

While other technology providers had estimated the conversion would cost about half a million dollars, Information Builders completed it for a fraction of the cost. Choctaw Nation now has a new reporting environment that provides direct access to information that financial analysts found difficult to access before. The Nation has realized a cost-savings of at least $200,000 through rapid report development and more accurate accounting practices.

For example, several new WebFOCUS reports enable the finance department to close the financial books 80 percent faster than before. Many of these reports used to take days to create; now they take minutes. The old system used Excel spreadsheets and macros to compile financial data, but once WebFOCUS recreated those reports using programmatic accounting functions, the entire accounting cycle became quicker and more accurate.

“We are now closing our books faster than ever and almost every accountant uses the dashboard on a regular basis,” says Everson. “It used to take four days to compile monthly financial reports. Now all they have to do is hit ‘Run’ to summarize and compare all of the data the same day.”

The seamless integration between WebFOCUS and Microsoft Excel makes these new financial reports particularly useful. “WebFOCUS exports directly to Excel, giving you a balance sheet tab, an income statement tab, a cash flow tab, and a year-over-year comparison tab,” says Teresa Gardner, senior business analyst for the Choctaw Nation. “It’s all one worksheet, making it extremely easy to use.”

“I’ve been getting all of the technical support I need when a problem arises,” adds James Carmean, business intelligence developer for the Choctaw Nation. “Information Builders is always there with the extra help. We’ve been treated very well.”

Extending BI to Hundreds of People

WebFOCUS is likely to be gradually incorporated into all of the Nation’s businesses in the near future, resulting in smarter staffing, better insight into corporate performance, and an enhanced understanding of customer behavior. Stark estimates that there are more than 400 potential users in both the business and government functions of the Choctaw Nation.

“BI is contagious, and it’s starting to trickle down,” confirms Carmean. “More and more mid-level corporate employees want to analyze businesses data. WebFOCUS can easily access a great deal of our information, which means we have an effective method in place to analyze, display, and visualize data more effectively across the board.”