Xilinx
All Programmable
Xilinx, Inc. is a leading supplier of programmable logic solutions. It is known for inventing the field-programmable gate array and as the first semiconductor company with a fabless manufacturing model.
Financial Reporting Lacked Efficiency
Xilinx’s financial reporting system was used by the finance team and executive staff to track revenue, shipments, and backlogs. These reports helped leadership see how the company was performing on a daily, weekly, and quarterly basis against the forecast set by different market segments. Reconciliation of data with the existing system involved performing complex spreadsheet calculations, a task requiring two financial analysts querying the Essbase cube and crunching numbers to build these reports manually in Excel and PowerPoint daily. Further, no portal existed for executive management to access reports once they were ready to be published, so they were manually sent out via email.
The existing way of running financial reports was inefficient both from a resource and time perspective. Xilinx wanted an automated financial reporting system that would give executives access to real-time reports across multiple geographies for better insight into business health.
Specific business goals included:
- Real-time reporting of financial data in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) from Essbase and planning cubes
- Interactive and intuitive dashboards with graphical and drill-down capabilities to help business users make informed decisions
- A mobile reporting platform that provides executives access to key summary reports
Optimized Reporting Delivers Insight
We integrated data from Hyperion Essbase cubes, Oracle Database 12c, and the ERP transactional systems into OBIEE. OBIEE was chosen as an enterprise-wide application that could address all BI analysis and reporting needs. We implemented ad-hoc reporting in OBIEE to enable users to do their own analysis and built interactive dashboards for financial reports reconciliation. Lastly, to meet its mobile reporting requirement, we worked with Xilinx to implement Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile App. Its integration with the Oracle BI on-premises application provides seamless connectivity and access to dashboards and reports for analytics anywhere, anytime.
Xilinx saved six hours daily by streamlining processes previously performed by a financial analyst. Two full days were saved every quarter to build reports.
Results
Enabled for Better Business Acuity
The new automated financial reporting system gives Xilinx better insight into its business health and reduced inefficiencies by eliminating the manual effort required for consolidation of financial data. Xilinx has realized multiple additional benefits:
- One application (OBIEE) to satisfy enterprise-wide financial reporting needs
- Significantly reduced the lead time to deliver reports to the business
- Saved six hours daily by streamlining processes previously performed by a financial analyst
- Two full days were saved every quarter to build reports; now these are available to the business instantly via an OBIEE dashboard
- Ad-hoc reporting capabilities
- Mobile reporting with automated report delivery
- Drill-down reporting capability
