1. Company that distributes financial statements to managers

Company XYZ use their ERP report writer to produce monthly department Profit & Loss reports with actual, budget and variance information. Peter, the controller, exports the reports to Excel and send them to his 15 department heads for review. Upon analyzing her financial report, Lisa, the manager for the IT department discovers that the line “Training Expenses” (which is account 6250 in their GL) is 40% above budget.

In the past, prior to installing Drill Anywhere, she would have contacted Peter and asked him to produce an account inquiry report from the ERP system showing all the journal entries for the Training Expenses account, and then upon receiving the report back from Peter, she would look for any unusual expense items in the report. When she found what she was looking for, she might have to request an additional inquiry report from the Accounts Payable module to study the line items on the voucher that made up the GL journal entry to see if the they were correct. All of this would not only involve several people, but it could take several days and delay analysis and decision making.

Using Drill Anywhere, she does not need any help or any report writer. She simply right clicks on the Training Expense line item in the Profit & Loss report she received from Peter, and a few seconds later, all the underlying journal entries are returned from the ERP database to Excel on her desktop. She then uses one of the built in filtering and sorting capabilities to find the Journal entry she was looking for, and then right-clicks again to drill into the corresponding voucher in the Accounts Payable module of the ERP database. A couple of seconds later all the line items on that voucher are returned to Excel on her desktop, and she have the answers she need.

Conclusion: With the Drill Anywhere Excel add-in installed, any employee (user security controls who can see what) can reduce the inquiry and analysis time for their reports from days to a few seconds. All of this without requiring them to have costly user licenses and training for the ERP system and its report writer. The result is dramatic cost savings in software licenses and training expenses, higher employee satisfaction, improved customer service and much quicker decision making.

2. Company that distributes sales reports to sales staff

Company XYZ uses their ERP report writer to produce and distribute sales reports to their sales force. Without Drill Anywhere, sales people constantly lacked visibility to the underlying detail from the sales order processing module of the ERP system, leading to lack of interest in the sales reports, lack of understanding of what numbers where composed of and a lot of calls and e-mails to the accounting staff to inquire about detailed sales data, such as detailed line items (e.g. individual products with quantities and price listed on an invoice).

With Drill Anywhere installed, each sales person only needs a few minutes of training to learn how to right click on a line in the Excel reports they receive, and then Drill Anywhere will return all the underlying detail from the sales order processing module. They can see everything they need to answer their own or customers questions about such things as: Who purchased which items, prices, quantities and any other information stored in the sales module of the accounting system.

Conclusion: With Drill Anywhere, the entire sales force can easily be empowered to find the sales detail hidden behind the numbers in the standard reports they receive, resulting in very quick response to customer inquiries and almost instant answers to their own questions, with no involvement from the corporate accounting staff and no ERP or report writer license required. The result is better customer service, reduced costs, and sales people can that can spend their time selling rather than waiting for answers to financial questions.

3. Auditors that analyze reports/data in Excel

Both pre- and post Sarbanes Oxley, auditors have needed a barrage of reports to supply them with both summary and detailed information so that they complete their work in a timely manner.

Prior to using Drill Anywhere, the accounting staff at Company XYZ spent weeks going back and forth between their auditors and their ERP system to get the required information to explain discrepancies, variances, etc. during the audit period.

After installing Drill Anywhere, Company XYZ now provide Auditors with the required financial statements, give the auditors a few minutes of training (to learn how to right-click in their Excel reports to drill down), and then the auditors can very quickly and easily access all the underlying detail from the ERP database without the assistance of the company's accounting staff.

Conclusion: Supplying auditors with Drill Anywhere to reduce the burden on the company's accounting staff, and to make the auditor's work faster and easier.