The situation. Aon Asia is the region's leading provider of risk management, insurance and reinsurance brokerage and human capital consulting, part of a group with about 47,000 people in more than 120 countries. Its regional management wanted a clear picture of revenue by industry, product, office and client, and could not get one. Reporting ran by hand from regional director to country segment head to country finance, with every step compiled and checked manually, and different versions of the numbers emerging from different parts of the business.
The constraint. Three people supported twelve countries, with one more giving half his time to the project. Regional project manager Glen Francis ruled out traditional OLAP tools, which "require a lot of internal and external resources to implement, deploy and support", and set two criteria: cost, and ease of use for both the interface and ongoing maintenance.
What KMS built. Working with Aon's regional data warehouse architect, the team built a Qlik application that analyses revenue by region, local office and account representative, product line, industry and client type. When the prototype was shown to the chairman and CEO for Asia Pacific with revenue detail by client, he said: "This is the information I've wanted for the past ten years." The project was approved on the spot.
From twenty templates to six. The regional CFO then sponsored a second phase for the budget process, generating actuals, current figures and forecasts for the budget worksheets and consolidating them back for reporting. The team first built twenty financial templates, found that was too much for users to act on, and cut them to six standard templates: budget summary, client budget, detailed analysis, top client, revenue analysis and top revenues. Every template reports in local currency and US dollars and is filtered by login.
"The beauty is that we can now see exactly where things are performing well and where things have gone wrong. Before, we had multiple sources and never knew if a reporting problem was just bad data or a real issue." — Tom Gill, Regional CIO, Aon Asia
Results. Aon calculated tangible savings of USD 221,000 on the initial deployment, before counting the manual budgeting time removed. Segmentation is standard across the region, overlap has been eliminated, and the project uncovered and corrected inconsistencies in how products, industries and clients were coded. Within about two months of purchase regional management treated the application as essential, and the chairman uses it as part of his balanced scorecard.
Aon Asia gets a single view of revenue across twelve countries