Lancaster, one of the United Kingdom’s leading retail motor groups, is putting its financial management process on the Web with Comshare’s e-business management planning and control (MPC) solution. Users at Lancaster’s head office and more than 70 reporting locations will have intranet access to a central database for planning, budgeting, financial data consolidation, management reporting, and analysis. “A significant amount of time is spent re-keying historic actuals into the spreadsheets and entering the budget numbers,” said Andrew Thomas, Lancaster group financial systems manager. “Comshare’s MPC solution will automatically populate the historic actuals and seed the budget periods with data. We can then spend more productive time modeling the data.” Comshare’s system for MPC is built on a Business Intelligence (BI) platform known as the Comshare Application Architecture (CAA), which is the foundation technology for Comshare’s packaged MPC applications and a flexible platform on which companies can create custom BI applications. CAA is an open environment that lets companies select information from the world’s leading databases, based on their specialized needs and existing IT standards Comshare CAA supports several databases, including Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 OLAP Server, Oracle 7/8, and Hyperion Essbase.
