Oracle Magazine - September/October 2008

This has certainly been the case at Merrill Lynch, where a key portion of the company’s Hyperion Essbase environment is Hyperion Data Relationship Management, where all the reporting hierarchies are maintained.

“Information is fed continuously throughout the day into an Oracle-based reference data repository, which is a single point of distribution for all the general ledger–based financial reference data within Merrill Lynch,” says Merrill Lynch’s Bohra. “The reference data repository then feeds into the finance data warehouse—based on Oracle technology—that’s then used by the business intelligence platform for all Merrill Lynch reporting and consolidation.”

Dynamic business requirements demand dynamic information management and business intelligence, and that’s why Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion Data Relationship Management are such an important component of Merrill Lynch’s finance technology solution.

“Organizations have all this great data, and a good business intelligence system allows you to bring that together and build a logical model. Hyperion Essbase adds the value of understanding that data and being able to predict your business based on that data and then tracking the business to see exactly how well you did or didn’t do,” says Oracle’s Farrell.

“The concept is being able to build dynamic applications that can change as your business changes, and bringing information together in context is key.”

In the end, for Merrill Lynch, the real benefit of having an integrated Oracle architecture for its finance technology needs is allowing its employees to spend time on what really matters—business decisions.

“Our infrastructure allows our users to invest time analyzing data for business benefit rather than spend time just trying to collect the data,” says Merrill Lynch’s Bohra. O