Milton Hershey Builds Intranet Reporting System for Cost and Budgeting Analysis

Snapshot

Organization Milton Hershey School.

Profile A co-educational residential school.

Headquarters Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The Challenge To develop a reporting capability that permits real-time access to financial information from the J.D. Edwards Integrated Financial Software System.

The Results To develop a reporting capability that permits real-time access to financial information from the J.D. Edwards Integrated Financial Software System.

iWay Software Solution WebFOCUS.

For organizations dependent on host-based systems, transferring character-based applications and reporting systems to the Web is one of IT's leading concerns. Just ask Adam Hohenwarter, director of Information Technologies at Milton Hershey School (MHS). "More and more organizations are implementing Web-based data warehouses and decision support systems to supply an intuitive interface to data that once seemed remote and inaccessible," Hohenwarter says. "This type of innovation allows organizations to empower professionals with hands-on access to important decision-making information."

Milton Hershey School is a co-educational residential school located in Hershey, PA, which was established through the generous philanthropy of Milton and Catherine Hershey in 1909. The childless couple, through the transfer of Hershey Foods stock, established a $60 million endowment that today provides funding to support the entire operation of the School. This endowment has been providing a sound education and wholesome environment at three state-of-the-art schools and 104 separate residential homes. The mission of the school is to nurture and educate needy children regardless of race, nationality, or religion.

The school's financials are maintained in an IBM AS/400 midrange computer running the J.D. Edwards Integrated Financial Software System including general ledger, purchasing, inventory management, financial reporting, accounts payable, fixed assets, and equipment/plant maintenance modules. In the past, important financial information regarding budgets and expenditures was disseminated through printed reports on a monthly basis. It was a cumbersome process.

"Our challenge was to develop a reporting capability that allowed for real-time access to financial information and provided a user-friendly interface that simplified the report generation process," says Hohenwarter. "We wanted to make sure that all who needed access to the financial information could do so with ease. That way, we could push ownership of the budget management process down to the appropriate level."

For example, house parents needed to be able to track student-related expenses incurred in their units. (House parents are those employees who care directly for students in their residences.) In the past, these individuals were limited to reports that were centrally printed and disseminated. In addition, the reports contained only summary and year-to-date information, so the Finance Department had to get involved when greater levels of detail were needed.

Solving Legacy Data Access Problems

Hohenwarter and his colleagues considered several types of data warehousing strategies for accessing the host-based financial data. However, they determined that many of the data warehousing solutions were too expensive to implement and support. Because the school uses both Macintosh computers and PCs, they focused on a Web-based solution that would allow access to their legacy data. "We needed to give employees an easy way to access the data on the school's legacy systems without requiring terminal emulation, additional J.D. Edwards user licenses, and significant training," says Hohenwarter. "Our perception was that Web-to-legacy systems were difficult to build from the ground up, necessitating complex tools and utilities for data access and conversion."

That perception changed when the school discovered Information Builders' Web development, reporting, and data access tools. The school selected a combination of Information Builders products:

EDA application integration technology to connect the AS/400 midrange system with a Microsoft Windows NT platform, where financial data would be stored in a new data warehouse.

• WebFOCUS for J.D. Edwards to extract and format J.D. Edwards data for reporting.
• WebFOCUS to present the information on the school's intranet using standard Web browsers.

Together, these tools create a user-friendly, Web-ready reporting environment powerful enough to handle even the most complex financial reports and consolidations. WebFOCUS for J.D. Edwards made it easy to create logical views of data using everyday business terminology. Developers simply click on plain English field names from the J.D. Edwards data dictionaries to select the relevant data. From there, EDA stages the data to a Windows NT platform connected to the Web server, where the WebFOCUS reports reside.

Hohenwarter and others at Milton Hershey worked with Information Builders consultants and training professionals to learn how WebFOCUS for J.D. Edwards would mesh with the school's existing systems. The result was the Financial Control System (FCS), an enterprise-wide data access and reporting environment that allows each house parent and department head to track actual costs incurred in their units. "FCS pushes responsibility of managing expenditures to individuals," explains Hohenwarter. "They simply use a standard Web browser to find out what has been spent and if they are falling within their budget constraints."

Developers paid particular attention to maintaining the security of the J.D. Edwards financial data. "We wanted to give FCS users access to information but not to the J.D. Edwards application itself," says Hohenwarter. "The AS/400 EDA Server utilizes the existing business unit security tables contained within the J.D. Edwards system to limit access to data by department. This feature allowed us to secure the data without duplicating security."

Gaining Momentum

Milton Hershey has recently rolled out the reporting system to 100 house parent couples who care for 1,050 students in their residences. After a number of demonstrations to key managers and the introduction of FCS on the school's intranet, usage picked up steadily. Today, there are more than 300 managers and staff using the system. In the past, these users received financial reports only once a month. Now, since access is virtually instantaneous, employees are using the system more frequently.

"WebFOCUS allows us to unlock the data from the AS/400 and provide information to those who need it regardless of what computer they use," says Hohenwarter. "It also allows users to drill down for detailed information so house parents and department heads can use the information as a management tool."

For example, users can answer questions such as "How much money do I have left to spend" or "Did the bills go through that I wanted paid this month?" The Web interface is easy for people to understand, reducing training costs. House parents can quickly verify what has been spent and see if they are falling within their budget constraints.

"FCS has created a new-found awareness of what things cost and, in turn, more creative ways of managing budgets and making spending decisions," says Hohenwarter. "Department heads are using the system to analyze and manage their budgets more effectively. So far, everything indicates better control of our budget."

Extending the Legacy

Now that MHS has cleared the initial implementation hurdles, the school has recently developed some additional WebFOCUS applications such as an open purchase order/requisition report system, which is used to view all open orders for a given area of responsibility. "This report has enhanced the budget management process by allowing users to view those costs which have been encumbered but have not yet hit their respective budgets," says Cynthia Richmond, senior manager, Business Systems. "The ability to view these costs provides the budget manager a clearer picture of where they stand in relation to their total annual budget."

Another new report – the work order status report – allows house parents and staff to obtain the status of open work orders for a particular building location. Richmond says this report has saved numerous telephone calls to the IT Help Desk and Customer Service Center by employees inquiring on the status of work requests for their equipment and buildings.

Scott Miller, manager of accounting at MHS, believes that as the Web becomes more popular and widespread, computer users have higher expectations. "Lay people are starting to expect flexible, detailed search and drilling capabilities that produce answers to specific questions," he says. "This makes systems such as FCS appealing to a broad audience."

Meanwhile, IT pros such as Hohenwarter are quick to point out the technical significance of what systems such as FCS can do: transform legacy data that was formerly hard to access or difficult to understand into information that helps users solve the problems of the moment. "The financial control system is now a working tool," he concludes. "We have put a very human face on budget issues and allowed employees to be aware of how their decisions and actions affect the bottom line."