TopDown Consulting and Ditech Communications

TopDown Consulting Helps Ditech Communications Transition
Smoothly From Hyperion Pillar to Hyperion Planning

About Ditech Communications
Ditech Communications Corporation is a global telecommunications equipment supplier for communications networks. Ditech Communications’ voice processing products serve the needs of mobile and wire-line operators for circuit and packet based networks. Ditech products include high-capacity voice enhancement and echo canceller solutions that utilize advanced software and digital signal processor (DSP) technology. This combination of software and hardware allows Ditech Communications to deliver Voice Quality Assurance™ (VQA™), a robust and cost-effective solution for voice enhancement that includes both noise reduction and echo cancellation to provide improved sound quality on calls made over wireless networks. Ditech Communications’ VoIP products combine VQA technology with packet voice processing and security capabilities to enable carriers to deploy end-to-end VoIP services across network security boundaries without requiring network re-architecting. Ditech Communications (DITC) is
listed on the Nasdaq National Market. Based in Mountain View, CA, Ditech Communications has been serving the needs of telecommunications service providers for over 15 years, and in that time, their echo cancellation and voice quality improvement products have been deployed on 6 continents in more than 34 countries on over 7 million voice channels.

Challenges
Ditech was facing strategic issues demanding a new planning and forecasting solution. They were using Hyperion Pillar as an operating expense planning tool and MS Excel templates to create their revenue plans. The data was then consolidated in Excel to create a complete P&L plan. This approach was maintenance intensive and required significant manual effort. Users were frustrated with the overall complexity of the budgeting cycle, a cumbersome input process, and the inability to look at budgets while others were working in the system. Ditech wanted a more robust tool to perform revenue and expense planning, with a high level of out-of-the-box reporting capabilities. Additionally, Ditech needed a solution to meet new reporting needs because of their growing product mixes.

Solutions
Ditech is a mid-size company with very few resources to administer applications. They needed a solution that could be easily maintained with very little administration, and was intuitive enough to be used by their high-level executives. Due to previous experience with Hyperion products, Ditech chose Hyperion Planning as their complete planning and forecasting solution. Ditech executives participated in the process to ensure the success of their implementation.

Results
Working with a team from TopDown Consulting, a recognized leader in the deployment of high-quality business performance management solutions and Hyperion Preferred Partner, Ditech achieved an improved planning process and enhanced reporting capabilities throughout their organization. Project successes include:
• Ditech leveraged their Pillar application to get their operating expense plan up and running within a matter of weeks, providing a faster return on their investment
• Manual loading of data was eliminated by interfacing Hyperion Planning with their GL System (QAD) and their internal CRM system (Microsoft CRM)
• Better visibility into operations has been achieved because more users are viewing more data
• Increased security and workflow have allowed budgets to be developed by individual department managers without providing visibility into protected information from other areas of the business
• Significant time savings has been achieved because there is no longer a need to extract and massage data in Excel. Previously, this took 5-10 hours during every monthly close and an additional 10 plus hours during every quarterly budget/forecast iteration
• Controls are improved because Ditech now creates a locked set of data at quarter end which is accessible for reporting
• User participation was encouraged during the implementation, so the new solution has received a very high level of user acceptance across the organization
• Consistency is improved because revenue and expense reporting is now in a central location
• Users are now able to respond to requests more effectively and quickly
• Ditech has achieved a giant leap forward in terms of power and flexibility of their solution
• Less than one day per month for one FTE is dedicated to application maintenance
• Data is now pre-populated into budgets using business rules, saving a lot of time during the budget cycle and allowing executives to focus on budgeting only a few key line items
• Budget data is immediately available on-line and users can now see variances in highlighted colors to focus their attention