During more than a century in London, Merchant Bank Henry Ansbacher & Co. Limited has seen dramatic changes. For example, new statutory requirements by the Bank of England and EC institutions, as well as the need to integrate their reporting with a new, international parent corporation, more than doubled their reporting load. To deal with these changes, Merchant Bank used iTM1's real-time OLAP technology to make fundamental improvements in their financial reporting systems.

Phil Remington, Assistant Director responsible for internal and external financial reporting, looked for a cost-effective solution that met both long and short term requirements. "Part of the problem we faced arose out of a change to a different accounting policy for the translation of overseas subsidiaries results. This rendered the old spreadsheet systems, which had been developed many years before, obsolete almost overnight. Upgrading the existing Lotus-based methods was not the answer," he said. "We needed a system designed specifically to be flexible and capable of handling future and yet undefined reporting requirements."

When Phil Remington saw iTM1 demonstrated, the advantages of an analytical database were clear. "Reporting speed and flexibility were impressive," he said. "Equally important, the product included powerful development tools enabling us, with Dimension's expertise, to tailor applications quickly to our precise needs."

Retaining a look and feel familiar to any spreadsheet user also reduced retraining and loss of productivity during introduction of the system. Phil Remington estimated that the retraining requirement alone would be five or six times greater for a product with a new and unfamiliar interface.

Commenting on the benefits of iTM1, Chartered Accountant Howard Taylor said: "The underlying structure and methodology of an OLAP product, such as iTM1, provides accountants and analysts with a powerful decision support tool with which they can both prepare and analyze information in a cross-functional and multidimensional manner. Having the ability to view performance information on-the-fly, from multiple perspectives, will provide most companies with a definite competitive advantage."

Conversion from local currencies to sterling is automated using iTM1's powerful formula writer. Using one formula, foreign currencies can be converted into sterling using the average exchange rate for profit and loss accounts and the closing exchange rate for balance sheet accounts. The same formula applies opening exchange rates to opening balances. At the same time, a foreign currency translation adjustment is calculated.

Currently, summary information supplied by group companies is entered to the reporting system in London. Group companies are about to be provided with their own iTM1 systems. This will give local management a powerful tool to run their operations and allow information to be exchanged more easily with the central database. Another application, already in operation, is liquidity monitoring. The vital task of tracking liquidity ratios is far more efficient and reliable when all the relevant information is held in a database designed to make access and manipulation easy.

"We can now monitor the situation with more precision and greater confidence," said Phil Remington. "The ease of access to a complete, constantly up-to-date set of data, held in one place, is invaluable."