CUNA Mutual Improves Strategic Planning, Budgeting, and Sales and Marketing Processes with Analytical Reporting Solution

It found what it required in the arcplan Enterprise 5 Process-Driven Analytics. CUNA Mutual’s staff was surprised how quickly they realized tangible benefits upon installation of the arcplan solution. Sophisticated, user-friendly reports are now generated quickly by high-end business users, freeing up IT staff for more strategic endeavors.

The Challenge

For CUNA Mutual Group, providing competitive services that contribute to the success and security of credit unions and the members they serve is essential. The confidence and trust credit unions have placed in CUNA Mutual is reflected in the fact that it protects, with one or more coverages, 98 percent of the 10,400 credit unions in the United States.

It is not enough to merely react to the changing needs of its members. CUNA Mutual needs and develop solutions to these needs before members think of them. Such agility and strategic initiative can only take place when an organization’s varied operations work in sync with one another. After implementing one reporting tool to build applications for its Sales and Marketing Interaction Center, CUNA Mutual decided to implement an additional commercial front end to Hyperion Essbase to improve the increasingly complex analysis and strategic planning and budgeting processes of its finance department.

However, what appeared to portend added efficiencies proved only to add frustration. Within nine months, Tom Wolf, a CUNA Mutual IT consultant, and his colleagues realized the new commercial front-end reporting application was not performing up to par. “They did a great sales job, but the functionality and support the vendor promised just wasn’t there,” said Wolf. “The tool never worked as promised.” The application proved unnecessarily complex for business users to achieve an efficient level of self-service. To add to frustrations, the software only connected to Essbase, yet CUNA Mutual needed to access information from its IBM DB2 RDBMS engine.

CUNA Mutual went looking for a better solution. Their ideal application would serve as a front end to their Hyperion Essbase and IBM DB2 RDBMS database structures in Finance along with the Hyperion Essbase database structures in Sales and Marketing Interaction Center. Both demanded rich functionality, continuity, and seamless integration in one Web-based, user-friendly business intelligence solution.

The Solution

“We weren’t looking for cookie cutter solutions,” said Teri Paltz, technology consultant.“We wanted software that was easy enough for our users, but versatile enough for the developers to work with on an ongoing basis.”

A committee of high-end business users and IT professionals evaluated a number of vendors in addition to arcplan. arcplan was the contender to beat, and moments after the proof of concept, the choice was clear. “It actually worked on our system,” said Wolf. “In minutes our salesperson drilled down to DB2 from Essbase. The other vendors worked on this for two days.”

CUNA Mutual implemented arcplan within six months of sign-off. There was only one surprise for the solution committee: “The speed from design to implementation was so much faster than I expected,” Wolf said.

arcplan helps IT get critical intelligence quickly to business users with rapid development of analytic applications and seamless connectivity to a broad range of data sources, leveraging existing IT investments. Employees access all the information they need to do their job in one seamless solution with the click of a mouse.

“All users log into a common Web page and based on their ID, a dynamically built list of reports is displayed,” said Wolf. The new development environment offers more control with added speed. Professional-looking and user-friendly reports are created over the Intranet. More than 330 reports, focusing on finance information and Sales & Marketing Interaction Center telephone statistics, contact and offer management information, and sales, have been produced, and more than 900 users have access to them. “The development environment is so flexible you can do anything you want with it,” said Dave Bartholomew, CUNA Mutual Group systems manager.

The Benefits

arcplan enables IT and business professionals to work together to produce customized, Web-based information delivery applications that require no programming to build and minimal IT intervention to use. It has made an enormous improvement to self-service. “Any report in our former front-end application required an IT person to be involved,” Paltz said. “We don’t have that with arcplan.”

“A quick implementation helped CUNA Mutual realize the benefits of the automated reporting solution faster. Cost savings per user is dramatic – estimated at $1,300 per user,” said Wolf. Paper savings is roughly estimated at no less than 6000 sheets per year, as the sales staff no longer needs to print out lengthy reports at the start of each day. Managers now skip printing equally lengthy handouts and present meeting materials via the Web.

IT costs are down. “In the Interaction Center, seamless real-time access to disparate back-end data sources save the equivalent of 30 to 50 percent of a full-time employee,” said Hartung.
Kandi Bennett, financial information analyst, notes that arcplan has added consistency to all financial data now updated via one central document per application. “It’s made our reports more user-friendly, and as we progress we will use fewer reports to access the data we need,” said Bennett. Speed of access to data is greatly improved. Financial reports that once took days to print out and post on a bulletin board are now accessed in real time via the Web.

The Sales & Marketing Interaction Center’s sales representatives and management now go “one-stop shopping.” “We use arcplan in the interaction center to great effect,” said Gary Hartung, senior manager of Sales & Marketing Interaction Center operations. “It’s the front end to 14 Essbase cubes, which pull data from eight disparate systems – this gives team leaders, managers, and particular sales representatives the ability to go one-stop shopping. It’s made big improvements in the delivery of information, and we’ve spent far less time on reports thus allowing more time for analysis.”

Minimal training was required. The platform’s highly intuitive interface enables users at any level of the organization to easily obtain and act on information. “The development and learning curve on this was great,” said Hartung. “Once we went through training we were able to develop reports without any external resources.”

Looking Ahead

CUNA Mutual has paved the way for a more strategic future by taking the complex information landscape of an enterprise and making it more easily observable, accessible, and navigable. “The information is in the hands of the people who really need it, rather than sitting in a pile of reports somewhere,” said Wolf.

“IT is able to work as more of a strategic partner, and our work looks more seamless to the end user,” added Paltz. Key future enhancements include more administrative applications, top-line summary reports for the CEO, traffic lighting reports on the interface and dashboard capabilities.

In the Interaction Center, balanced scorecards will be added for sales representatives to review critical factors or statistics with the ability to further drill down from multidimensional to relational databases for detailed information. Enhancements to show transactional information from the data warehouse are also planned.