Web-Based Business Intelligence Reduces Account Deliquencies and Improves Corporate Communication

Snapshot

Organization First Hawaiian Leasing engages primarily in commercial equipment and vehicle lease financing

The Challenge To provide greater efficiency in the lease accounting process through a simpler and faster reporting system

The Strategy Web-based, real-time business intelligence system for handling time-sensitive lease accounting information, such as deliquencies and customer credit overruns

Results Reduced account deliquencies by 46 percent; enabled direct access to a plethora of corporate business information

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, EDA (Now part of iWay Software's product suite)

Success is contagious. When First Hawaiian Leasing (FHL) combined Information Builders' WebFOCUS and EDA* Middleware to simplify data integration tasks and enhance corporate reporting, its parent company, First Hawaiian Bank (FHB) took notice.

"We've already had four or five demonstrations of WebFOCUS, and First Hawaiian Bank is pretty excited about getting its own copy," says Jeff Inouye, First Hawaiian Leasing's accounting systems officer. "Another big plus, as they envision it, is leveraging our EDA Middleware to access some of their unique platforms and databases."

First Hawaiian Leasing is in the business of providing alternative financing for commercial leasing accounts, primarily for customers of First Hawaiian Bank, but also for its own customers. These accounts range from hotels and hospitals to attorneys and airlines. Included in the diversity of items leased are cars, trucks, and tractors; large-ticket leverage leases of aircraft such as Lear jets, Boeing 777s, and cargo planes; and equipment including furniture, computers, medical equipment, aircraft seats and overhead bins, and golf carts.

Building a New Reporting Architecture

FHL began the process of building a new reporting architecture by moving its lease accounting system from the mainframe system it shared with First Hawaiian Bank to a more economical client/server environment. "The bank told us that it was getting expensive to run our application on the mainframe," Inouye recalls. "As we were going through the Y2K process, we decided to convert the lease accounting system to a client/server environment."

Inouye had other incentives as well. Under the mainframe-based system, all of the lease accounting data was extracted at month's end from a corporate financial system. The extracts were then printed and distributed to managers, marketing personnel, and collectors. "This process was inefficient for two reasons: our users had to wait until the end of the month to see the data, and the process of printing reports and distributing them involved considerable time and expense," Inouye explains.

For example, due to the delay in receiving reports about lease account delinquencies, a customer might be delinquent for as long as 30 days before FHL collectors could begin investigating the problem. Another month-end report listed all the active leases a customer had with FHL, which was used to determine the company's exposure, in terms of whether a customer was exceeding a credit limit. Because FHL could only look back to the last day of the previous month, a customer could have already exceeded his or her credit, but still be leasing vehicles and equipment.

"These reporting delays could have severe repercussions on the business if a customer suddenly wanted to lease a high-ticket item that would put him over the credit limit," Inouye relates. "Also, we had to wait until the end of the month to gather important business intelligence, such as overall company booking volume and marketing officer sales performance."

From Mainframe to Client/Server to the Web

Inouye hoped that the new client/server configuration would provide faster and easier ways to obtain this important information. To that end, he utilized Information Builders' FOCUS Desktop (now called WebFOCUS Power Reporter). His first task was to use the new software to download all the month-end data, store it on a Novell server, and create standard reports for users.

Unfortunately, FHL still generated only month-end data, and some users were uncomfortable generating their own reports. "We ended up with one person downloading extracts and running all the reports, which would then be printed and distributed," says Inouye. "We were still running just month-end reports, and we were still in the paper business."

All that changed when Inouye discovered WebFOCUS. "We saw immediately that it was the true solution we were looking for," says Inouye. "Finally, we had real-time access to business data. Users could simply click on a browser link to obtain up-to-the-second information."

WebFOCUS is Information Builders' tightly integrated business intelligence solution for building and deploying reporting and transactional systems over intranets, extranets, or the Internet. Its primary function is to deliver valuable information easily and instantly, at the point of business, where it is most vital. Combined with Information Builders' built-in strategic EDA Middleware, which allows for enterprise integration of multiple and diverse data structures and platforms, WebFOCUS becomes an access portal and analytical engine for transforming raw data into useful business information.

Fast Deployment of Intranet Reporting

Only six months after viewing a demonstration of WebFOCUS, FHL went live with its WebFOCUS-based reporting system. Inouye easily ported all the FOCUS Desktop reports to WebFOCUS and set up an efficient information architecture for corporate reporting via the intranet.

WebFOCUS resides on a Windows NT server, along with the built-in EDA Middleware. The NT server also holds extracts of month-end and historical data in a native FOCUS database, as well as auxiliary data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The lease accounting software and data are stored in a Sybase database on a HP-UX server.

Data is moved from the HP platform to the NT platform using EDA. "EDA's cross-platform capability is the key here," he remarks. "We found that we could easily move month-end data from the Sybase database on the HP-UX platform to the native FOCUS database on the NT server."

As a nonprogrammer, Inouye is quick to point out one significant advantage of the Web reporting architecture: zero client-side maintenance. "Even EDA is maintenance-free, which makes my job a whole lot easier," he says.

With this new architecture in place, WebFOCUS has fundamentally changed the way information is accessed at First Hawaiian Leasing. "The first boon is instant access," says Inouye, "and the second is ease-of-use. Users still have all the standard reports they are accustomed to, but instead of having to dig for information in a hardcopy report they can just point-and-click to find what they want."

Better Information to Improve the Business

The company has seen marked improvements in efficiency. "Our delinquencies, for example, have fallen 46 percent since we started using WebFOCUS," exudes Inouye. "Because our collectors catch them sooner, they can be more proactive and start collecting earlier."

Meanwhile, because month-end data is now archived, rather than merely replaced each month, FHL can look at historical data, making it much easier for executives to track trends over time. For example, they can track the volume of bookings for a specific period – either for the overall business or for individual sales representatives. Training was minimal, since most users took to the browser reporting metaphor as a matter of course. "Our people are interested in pushing sales, not trying to figure out how to work the computer," adds Inouye. "It only takes five minutes to figure out how to use this system."

Best of all, First Hawaiian Leasing is no longer in the paper report production business. "We used to create 15 to 20 reports each month," Inouye recalls. "We had to do the extract, print each report, make copies for everyone, and distribute them. This took about six hours. Today we just create an extract and put it on the Windows NT server. That takes three minutes. WebFOCUS generates the reports and delivers them to intranet users immediately."

As news of FHL's success has spread to First Hawaiian Bank, it has created a great deal of excitement. "Everyone at FHB now wants WebFOCUS," Inouye relates. "They also are discovering how they can leverage EDA, not only to easily access our leasing data, but to access information in some of their own databases and platforms. Information Builders' solution solves the two principal data processing needs of the organization: obtaining access to data, no matter where it resides, and transforming that data into useful information that can be delivered quickly to those who need it."

(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)