“When users want to find out how our numbers are turning for a specific account or
business . . . they can do that with a click using [Oracle’s] Hyperion Essbase.”
—Manoj Bohra, Director of the Business Intelligence and Development Departments, Finance Technology Group, Merrill Lynch
Like many organizations, speed to
market is critical for Merrill Lynch. “We
wanted to create an environment that
would be very flexible, so that it could
easily change as user needs are changing,
because we need to meet demanding business climate requirements,” says Manoj
Bohra, director of the business intelligence
and development departments of the
finance technology group at Merrill Lynch.
Merrill Lynch’s goals are part of a trend
that many companies—not just financial
services firms—share.
“We’re seeing several trends happening
in IT that are affecting enterprise organizations, such as financial services companies,” says Ted Farrell,
chief architect and senior vice president of tools and middleware, Oracle. “One of the first is extending business processes
and having an infrastructure that allows you to make changes
to the business very easily. Now, organizations need to be
able to adjust and make decisions faster, and service-oriented
architectures and solutions like Oracle Fusion Middleware and
Oracle Business Intelligence are allowing them to do that.”
As businesses and regulations evolve, flexible technology
is key.
“It’s become extremely critical for firms to implement
technologies that can change with the changing needs of the
business and regulatory environment,” says Rob Hegarty, managing director at Tower Group, a research and consulting firm
focused on the financial services industry. “All of those things
make it imperative that financial services firms have a highly
flexible, very open technology platform.”
SNAPSHOT
Merrill Lynch
www.ml.com
Headquarters: New York City
Revenue: US$11.25 billion
Employees: 64,200
Oracle products: Oracle’s Hyperion
Essbase – System 9, Oracle Data Warehouse,
Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Applications
(General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts
Receivable, Fixed Assets), Oracle’s Hyperion
Data Relationship Management, Oracle Human
Resources Management System, Oracle
Business Intelligence
FROM DIFFICULT TO FLEXIBLE
Like most financial services companies, Merrill Lynch has
many lines of business, including global markets and investment banking, global wealth management, fixed income, ML
Bank, and more. However, the company’s finance technology
group works horizontally across those units, supporting the
finance function for them in a consistent manner—expense
management, monthly close, legal and management reporting,
as well as transparency of balances.
Merrill Lynch once had many legacy applications that were
used for a combination of reporting and warehousing. The mix-and-match environments were troublesome, both from a support
perspective and in terms of the availability of profit-and-loss
and other reporting figures. The time it took to close accounting
periods was vital, and the company’s financial solution, based on
a mixture of systems, wasn’t meeting business needs.
These factors led to a decision to eliminate most legacy financial applications
and migrate to an Oracle-based environment. In addition, Merrill Lynch selected
Oracle for its data warehouse initiative
and Oracle’s Hyperion business intelligence applications to enable it to manage
and quickly change its business. Starting
in 2004 with its finance global initiative,
Merrill Lynch also merged nearly a dozen
general ledgers (GLs) into a single chart of
accounts within two instances of Oracle
Applications—one for the Americas and
one for all the regions. Its GL system is
fed by more than 300 sources.
“Our data warehouse is updated from both instances
of our Oracle Applications, with a latency of only a few
minutes,” says Bohra. “It’s a very aggressive data warehouse
environment powered by highly aggregated Oracle Essbase
reporting cubes.”
All the data can then be reported using Oracle’s Hyperion
Essbase – System 9 and Oracle tools, leveraging back-end
Oracle Databases. The system offers users information fast.
“When users want to find out how our numbers are
turning for a specific account or business for the last 13
months, or two years, or four years, they can do that with a
click using Hyperion Essbase,” Bohra says. “You don’t have to
come back to technology and change the requirements of how
the report should be changed. You can just click, click, click,
and in five minutes you can have a brand-new report depicting exactly what you wanted.”
The company’s combination of Oracle products—including
Oracle Business Intelligence, Hyperion Essbase – System 9,
Oracle’s Hyperion Data Relationship Management, Oracle
Applications, Oracle Data Warehouse using Oracle Database 10g,
and more—helps Merrill Lynch stay ahead of its competition.
INCREASING RESPONSIVENESS
Organizations in all industries depend on different technology products and tools for different functions in the
enterprise. The use and integration of key Oracle products,
however, can do much more than add those product features
to the enterprise.
“The combination of Oracle Business Intelligence with
the Hyperion Essbase products allows organizations to take
data from different, disparate sources and logically tie them
together, and not just into an information portal,” says Oracle’s
Farrell. “They enable you to create an abstract data model on
top of your physical data models that gives you views you
