Customers

Gilbane

Gilbane"BusinessObjects Finance lets us combine reporting of actual financial data with forecasting and budgeting data into one state-of-the-art solution. The result is quick, reliable, and highly accurate reports that provide one version of the truth from a single source."

Lori Giordano
Assistant Corporate Controller
Gilbane Building Company

Challenge1

With annual revenue of $2.5 billion, Providence, Rhode Island-based Gilbane Inc. is one of the largest family-owned companies in the U.S. construction and real estate industry. Composed of Gilbane Building and Gilbane Development companies, Gilbane provides integrated expertise in finance, development, planning, and construction.

For years, Gilbane used various legacy financial reporting databases, including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which couldn’t keep pace with growing demands for consolidated, monthly reports. “We had no centralized point of collecting and sharing all financial reporting data,” says Lori Giordano, assistant corporate controller at Gilbane Building. “Everything was on separate spreadsheets, which didn’t allow us to combine actual reporting with forecasting and budgeting.” As a result, Gilbane spent much time trying to put all needed data together into a single database.

Approach

Gilbane considered various performance management systems, and narrowed the choice to two candidates—and then to just one. “Three highly important attributes made BusinessObjects Finance the favorite,” Giordano says. “Our entire evaluation team, from vice president to the senior accountants, felt BusinessObjects Finance was ideally configured for ease of use by an accountant. It’s something we all could pick up quickly and work with effectively.”

An added benefit is the product’s intuitive user interface, which encourages someone trained in accountancy to easily develop the program’s analytical and comparative functions. The easy-to-use interface allows the building of advanced databases in disciplines outside traditional accounting. Richard Roy, VP and treasurer at Gilbane, says, “Once the actual numbers are entered, it effectively moves this data to a higher level for forecasting and reporting to our executives. And we can now update forecasts in a day or so—something that used to take two or more weeks.”

The final deciding attribute was a competitive price and excellent service from Business Objects, plus exceptional guidance and technical oversight from the firm’s office in Paris, France.

Results

With BusinessObjects Finance, Gilbane bundles various reports into a single, monthly book for significant efficiency improvements, giving Gilbane’s management key financial information faster. Roy says, “Much time was spent each month collecting and merging various financial data from disparate databases using different display modes. BusinessObjects Finance now combines all information into one easy-to-use book, which is shared with our executive management and regional offices.”

Enhanced reporting includes combining actual results with analytics, such as comparative reports that facilitate decision-making throughout Gilbane. The finance teams benefit by having detailed data readily available—without requiring a lot of duplicate data entry as did the previous systems. “BusinessObjects Finance gives the finance teams more time to analyze because less time is spent on repetitive data entry,” says Giordano.

Gilbane users are now able to take advantage of ad hoc analysis. “When executive management has questions, it’s far easier to get answers using BusinessObjects Finance because we can quickly enter the application to retrieve the necessary information,” says Roy.

BusinessObjects Finance easily integrates with Gilbane’s existing servers and internal IT platforms. Instead of multiple steps for consolidation, Gilbane requires a single consolidation step for its monthly reporting. On the horizon, Gilbane plans to expand the Business Objects solution to consolidate all of Gilbane, Inc. into a single financial statement for both the building and development companies.


1 Initially created by Cartesis, this document was updated by Business Objects following its acquisition of Cartesis in June 2007.

Smaller textLarger textPrint this page, properly formatted for paper

Quick Facts