Cadence Data Integration Engine
The client, a multi-billion Rand conglomerate selling a wide variety of value-added products, has a corporate structure consisting of some 22 subsidiaries and over 40 major partners. The value chain is complex, with a variety of product providers with different business models, and widely differing sales channel models. Many of the products are provided on a consignment basis, with virtual stock issued to our client which is in turn issued to the sales channel. Accounting for the value chain was extremely difficult, with estimates driving the reporting to shareholders and the regulatory authorities such as the stock exchange. Full reconciliations were only possible once a year, with the associated risk of errors causing losses or significant effort to recover funds. The annual audit was unsustainably expensive, with a massive disruption to administrative staff and sampled results that might not stand up to examination. Hundreds of different reports were run, wasting time and causing confusion. The client asked Youngblood to assist with automating this reconciliation process.
Principles
The client needed an automated process that was:
- Auditable from outcome back to source with hash totals, control balances, record counts and update histories
- Within 12 hours of real time, so problems could be identified and resolved before knock- on effects became unmanageable
- Highly automated, reducing the cost of manual intervention to a minimum
- Configurable, reducing the cost of IT programming resources
- Flexible, accommodating a wide range of business processes, database technologies and reconciliation rules
- Structured, enabling reporting using any tool that the client chose.
- Affordable, as increases in IT spend will not be allowed
Pricing
Youngblood deployed an early version of the Cadence tool. It is a business intelligence (BI) tool based exclusively on the research done by Kimbal up to 2018. It automates the collection of data from any database or spreadsheet source, delivery to a staging database and then through to a structured data warehouse that it generates from input configurations. Subsets, groupings, exclusions, duplications, errors and exceptions, notifications and corrections are all configurable. It also automates data tracking to source, operational runs and housekeeping. No programming is required except for very complex rules.
The client uses Cadence to date on 31 reconciliations, balancing billions of records from 24 different systems across 17 business partners, worth some R15 billion. This has been achieved with a staff of two, namely a senior BI analyst and a BI developer.
Outcome
The client has reduced annual audit fees by approximately R10 million. The audit takes 1 month where it used to take 3 months. Despite a number of new corporate acquisitions which would normally take time to integrate, or might have to be done manually, annual results are released significantly earlier than before. No provision needs to be made for revenue losses through the channel. BI staff have been reduced by 10 heads. Further to the above, access to multiple data sources in one central repository was brought down from 4 days to 30 minutes.
The client is delighted that all objectives have been met.
