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About First American
Based in Santa Ana, California since 1889, The First
American Corporation is a Fortune 500 company traded on the New York Stock
Exchange. Through nearly 1,200 offices and thousands of agents in the United
States and abroad, the company offers a wide variety of title insurance and
associated closing and escrow services for residential and commercial properties,
personal property collateral, aircraft, nautical vessels, and more. For the
last five consecutive years, Fortune Magazine has designated First American
as one of America’s most admired companies.
Challenges
With no standardized general ledger system used throughout the
company, First American needed to improve their process of collecting and
distributing data for monthly and quarterly reporting. The previous Excel-based
system involved consolidating spreadsheets submitted by over 100 field users.
This required significant manual effort to verify and validate the data and
maintain the spreadsheets. Lack of controls led to a high volume of errors
and meant that results often varied from cycle to cycle. The accounting staff
had limited time frames to make corrections and were barely keeping up with
the workload necessary to generate the reporting packages.
To relieve the pressure, First American determined that a centralized consolidation
application was needed. Their goals were to replace Excel to improve accuracy
and eliminate the extensive data reconciliation process, to provide better
financial reporting by generating a standard set of reports automatically,
and free up the finance staff for more valuable analysis.
Solutions
First American selected Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) as the
solution to streamline their consolidation and reporting process. With assistance
from Hyperion and TopDown, First American has established HFM
as a consistent and trusted repository of consolidated financial information.
To help ensure user acceptance and project success, the overall implementation
was split into multiple phases. The initial phases emphasized user training
and documentation during the rollout of the new application. Then, the solution
was expanded to include additional functionality and enhancements once the
users had successfully embraced the new system.
The HFM application was set up to automate the load of general ledger data,
then consolidate and verify results. Because users input details and make adjustments
directly via the web forms, they take ownership for their own numbers instead
of relying on corporate accounting staff. This automated approach has reduced
costs, and the improved data verification controls have increased confidence
in the numbers.
First American also leverages the low-cost web environment by utilizing Hyperion
Reports. Users can automatically generate over 200 different reports to meet
almost any information request.
Results
TopDown Consulting helped First American achieve measurable benefits
from their implementation. The project’s successes include:
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Replacing Excel with a consistent database of consolidated financial information
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Transferring responsibility for data validation from corporate accounting
to the end-users (data owners)
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Improving data accuracy and automating tie-out of supplemental quarterly
information
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Eliminating over 250 hours per quarter previously spent on manual data
reconciliation
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Providing access to consolidated financial information to over 100 users
via the Intranet
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Creating a dynamic user-friendly reporting system to replace the static
reports previously generated
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Utilizing the web to reduce ongoing maintenance and support costs
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Generating user excitement and enthusiasm for participating in new projects
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Contributing value to the business by reducing costs and providing more
valuable financial analysis
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Establishing a system that can grow and expand as the company continues
to grow and expand
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