Second, they provide enhanced reporting functionality. There are several benefits we expect with our first rollout for expense reporting. We also expect to dramatically improve the usability of our reporting solution by utilizing the Web, Excel, and Microsoft Outlook on the front end for reporting on expenses. In another area, we expect to reduce the cycle time required to develop reports and thus improve our ability to respond to ever-changing user reporting requirements. Finally, we are aiming to increase control over reporting queries against OLAP and OLTP systems.
Financial attributes associated with expense reporting are very complicated.
Many are specific to a particular ERP system. End users in charge of marketing and operating budgets don't usually understand all the intricacies of these attributes and therefore have problems weeding through the maze of terms and menu paths generally needed to generate reports and information for themselves. One of the goals of this project is to create a system that pushes this information out to the end user in a format they are used to, can use, and understand. The format we're using is Excel and our intranet. Talk about Information Builders ' specific capabilities.