With multiple locations in multiple countries all using different reporting applications and operating in their own local currencies, financial consolidation and closing the books at Brunswick was a complicated exercise requiring considerable effort and presenting numerous challenges.

Not having sufficiently detailed operating unit financial data accessible at the corporate level, for example, made it difficult to respond to a growing number of information requests from senior management, industry and financial analysts, and auditors. Finance staff were often required to go right back down to the source general ledger location internationally, relying on phone calls, multiple e-mails and a manual consolidation effort to pull together required information.

To overcome these challenges, Brunswick replaced its failing legacy consolidation and management reporting system with the Longview Consolidation application, which was easily configured to accommodate data from 50+ different source systems in 250 reporting units and in 20 to 25 different local currencies.

“We needed the ability to have a large number of accounts and entity hierarchies to do all the reporting we required, and we saw Longview as the best tool to meet those needs,” says Cathy Olstad, Senior Manager, Financial Systems, Brunswick Corporation.

Longview Consolidation not only makes it easier for Brunswick finance staff to close the books in a timely fashion, but as the single financial data source for the entire organization, it has enabled Brunswick to drive consistency into the management reporting across all divisions.

“The process efficiency we get by using the Workflow feature to automatically manage the whole close process and schedule is probably one of the best benefits of using Longview,” says Olstad, describing how it not only helps them manage the process of going out to all the transactional GL systems in the operating units to gather detailed consolidation data, but also improves data quality by moving some of the validations closer to the people who best understand the source data and thus are best able to make corrections quickly and accurately.

The Brunswick project gave Longview the opportunity to demonstrate its continued commitment to building relationships based on providing unparalleled customer support – from initial feasibility, planning and architecture phases, right through to implementation and ongoing support.

“Longview has always taken a true partnership approach to our relationship and they are very open when working with us,” says Olstad. “We can just pick up the phone any time and speak directly with the system architect or technical support and we don’t have to jump through hoops to get something addressed.”

“We’re very pleased about the opportunity and the results of the Longview implementation at Brunswick,” says John Power, President of Longview Solutions. “It’s an excellent example of how a global organization with strategic vision is leveraging world-class technology from Longview to realize tangible, quantifiable business benefits.”

Using DataSynapse GridServer technology, organizations can create a cost-effective High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment by tapping into the unused processing and storage capacity of existing servers across the enterprise. Applications that are virtualized can be split into functional components, such as individual calculations, modeling and simulations, that can all be processed in parallel across a distributed computing infrastructure, significantly reducing the overall processing time.

At the investment banking division of one of the UK’s biggest global banking groups, for example, it was taking two hours each night to upload and aggregate 500,000 lines of financial transaction data from the bank’s General Ledger system into the Longview database to support the bank’s daily reporting requirement. By virtualizing the Longview application using the DataSynapse GridServer technology so that billions of complex calculations could be performed in parallel by a large number of servers and desktops across the bank’s global computing infrastructure, the processing time for complex calculations has been reduced by more than 90 percent.

“The bank had already invested in GridServer technology from DataSynapse to accelerate the performance of its trading and risk management applications,” says Kevin Kelly, Director, Business Development, EMEA at DataSynapse. “The bank was able to simply and quickly add the Longview application to the existing computing grid, significantly improving their ability to perform timely, accurate financial reporting based on massive amounts of data – an otherwise difficult task for any performance management tool.”

The Longview-DataSynapse solution addresses a challenge familiar to many companies – uploading financial data from a GL system, along with data from other systems such as HR and ERP, to a multi-dimensional performance management tool, where various calculations can be performed, comparisons with budgets and forecasts made, and reports generated on the performance of the business. For most companies using most performance management tools, this process takes place quarterly, monthly or perhaps weekly. In a GridServer environment, the Longview application can do this on a daily or more-frequent basis, even for the largest data requirements. This is especially helpful for large companies processing large volumes of data that want real-time reporting capabilities.

“By virtualizing the Longview application with GridServer technology, we can now perform complex calculations on billions of rows of data in a fraction of the time,” says Mark E. Burton, President and CEO, Longview Solutions. “This is great news for Longview customers, who can now leverage existing computing capacity worldwide to achieve dramatic new levels in performance and scalability, while still getting all the benefits of a single application and a single repository of data that have made the Longview Platform unique in the industry.”

Longview Solutions announced today that Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), a Time Warner company and a leading provider of programming for the cable industry, has chosen to implement the Tax Provision & Data Collection functionality of the Longview Performance Management Platform. Longview Tax which is expected to be implemented and fully operational by end of Q1/07, will be used by TBS, Inc. to collect tax data from subsidiaries around the world, calculate its consolidated tax provision and produce its tax footnote immediately upon close.

“We needed to get away from using spreadsheets for our tax provision work,” explains Robert Sauban, VP Taxes at TBS, Inc. “We’re getting a much more bullet-proof solution with Longview, especially since all the data is stored and manipulated within a single database rather than being transferred back and forth between a number of systems. There’s a certain ‘truth’ that comes from this, so our tax provision results will be more trustworthy.”

In describing their choice of the Longview Platform over other tax solutions considered, Sauban goes on to say that in addition to automatically creating their effective tax rate reconciliation and footnote for their financial statements, he expects to benefit from the capability of Longview Tax to keep their tax basis balance sheet up to date on an ongoing basis.

“Tax departments are always being challenged to do a tax basis balance sheet, so it’s very important to me that Longview does it automatically,” adds Sauban. “This will save us valuable time that we can put into doing more analysis instead of just calculating things.”

Sauban concluded his remarks by saying that, “There are other tax packages out there but they don’t offer the same flexibility or degree of automation. The Longview team is top notch and their product performed beautifully during our proof-of-concept testing.”

“We’re delighted to have TBS, Inc. as a customer,” says Bob Norton, VP Tax Solutions at Longview. “Longview Tax was designed specifically for global tax organizations such as TBS, Inc. that need to do their tax provisions faster and with greater accuracy, while bringing stronger controls to their entire FAS 109 process.”