Premier Coal Gains Newfound Speed and Flexibility in Oracle Financial Reporting with GL Wand

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY2013–2014

“Across the company, I could save a week easily on running and modifying reports with GL Wand. We are avoiding inefficiencies and saving money by having more timely information.”

Sue Della, Premier Coal Limited

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY2013–2014

Premier Coal Limited operates a major open cut coal mine in Collie, Western Australia, and provides power generation fuel for the area’s southwest integrated electricity grid. With a long-term supply contract with the state’s power generator, Verve Energy, the company is committed to producing coal in a safe and environmentally sound manner.With a 60-year history in both open cut and underground min-ing in Western Australia’s Collie Basin, Premier Coal Limited con-solidated operations in 1995 into one new, high-capacity and high-efficiency Premier Mine—with modern systems and tech-nology. It is the most advanced coal mine in Western Australia. An Oracle customer since 2005, Premier upgraded to R12 in 2010 utilising Oracle’s fully integrated ERP system, including

maintenance, supply and payroll. Premier used Oracle FSGs and Discoverer with a data warehouse for financial report-ing, and was growing increasingly frustrated with the time it took to produce reports. With a commitment to ongoing improvements in performance to increase productivity and reduce operating costs, Premier looked to Excel4apps in 2010 to improve its reporting from Oracle Financials.

“We were trying everything,” said Sue Della, former Senior Management Accountant with Premier. “The standard Oracle reporting tools were so time consuming. Before GL Wand, monthly closes in Oracle took another day to pro-duce. Then, the cost reports we distribute internally would take another several days. GL Wand has saved us a phe-nomenal amount of time.”

Quick Download Proves Valuable

Premier downloaded the free trial of GL Wand when it began its search for a reporting solution to ease frustra-tion with reporting using Oracle Discover and FSGs. The GL Wand solution immediately exposed Oracle GL balances in real-time, improving the overall perceptions and attitudes towards the value Oracle could bring to the company.

“Everyone who tried it wanted it,” Della said. “It spread like wildfire. And GL Wand’s costs are quite minimal compared with the benefits we could get for our business.”

Management was happy to approve the GL Wand purchase, given the issues and time delays the accounting team was ex-periencing with reporting from Oracle. Della was easily able to install the new software, without IT Department involvement.

Timely Reports Improve Accounting Processes

GL Wand has significantly improved the responsiveness of Della’s accounting team. “Business managers would en-quire on a specific account balance, and it seemed to take forever to get the answer from Oracle using the report-ing solutions it provided,” she said.

With GL Wand, account information was readily avail-able using the GL Wand Excel interface, allowing ac-counting users to drill down on balances quickly to ob-tain the answers business managers needed.

“When we found GL Wand, we drastically improved fi-nancial reporting,” described Della. “We could plan, de-velop and analyze reports easily. We produced reports in hours rather than days. All of our reporting—trial balances, monthly reports, ad hoc reports, everything—is now done out of GL Wand through its easy Excel interface.”

GL Wand’s speed is particularly beneficial for month-end reconciliation reports. Once the report format is created, the data can simply be refreshed each month. If team

GL Wand for Oracle shown

Managers Happy with Speed and Flexibility

In addition to Della’s accounting team, managers across the company like GL Wand’s functionality and speed.

“They are very impressed,” she said. “We can drill down and immediately locate what we need with GL Wand, whereas if we had to log into Oracle, we’d have to split between the General Ledger and the Accounts Payable. With GL Wand you can click on a balance and using GL Wand’s unique drill through capability you can access critical information like a job number or an invoice. You can see your supplier number, your invoice number. It’s great.”

She described a situation where one manager in the Pro-duction Department wanted a report on Explosives costs broken out by specific materials. “All we had to do was hit a button and refresh and we had the data right there for him. I cannot imagine how long it would have taken me in Discoverer to write that report.”

“If someone comes in and asks how much it costs to truck a ton of coal in a pit, you can do it so simply,” she said.

“This product makes a tremendous difference for financial and accounting teams. You can’t run your business if you can’t get the information you need, and GL Wand delivers. It’s a fantastic product.” Sue Della, Premier Coal Limited

members want more detail, they can drill down quickly to a complete breakdown of the account.

“It makes life so much easier,” Della said. “Across the com-pany, I could save a week easily on running and modifying reports with GL Wand. We are avoiding inefficiencies and saving money by having more timely information.”

Making simple adjustments, like date changes, had been cumbersome with Standard Oracle reports – and did not provide the latest General Ledger data. With GL Wand, reports are now easily modified for different busi-ness requirements, and provide real-time data as well as an extremely helpful feature that allows for automated report distribution.

“You don’t change FSGs often once they are written, and although it is supposed to be easy, even simple changes can be tedious,” Della described. “Standard Oracle reports are static, whereas GL Wand is quite dynamic and flexible, with access to real-time data. We can have one standard report as a template and then replace various sections for HR, for Finance, for Tech Services and so on. The Report Dis-tribution Manager in GL Wand automatically produces and sends the reports where they need to go. These reports can be in various formats, including HTML and PDF.”

Maintenance Mines Financial Data

Della’s group works closely with Premier’s Maintenance Department, which operates on a $30 million annual budget and needs to know on demand how costs are tracking against budget.

“To get the information in the format and layout the busi-ness users needed, it really required a programmer to write the report,” Della described. “With GL Wand, the account-ing team planned and developed the reports in Excel and now we can get the answers almost instantaneously.”

Premier has installed GL Wand on the computers used by key members of the maintenance team so the informa-tion they need is at their fingertips. Della’s team writes the report and turns it over to them so they can get updated information with a simple refresh.

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Since 1950, Premier Coal Limited has supplied 90 million tons of coal to Western Australians.

With 300 employees, the company produces 5 million tons of coal per year.

Premier has used Oracle for 8 years and upgraded to R12 in 2010.

After installing GL Wand in 2010, Premier saw immediate benefits. In fact, enthusiasm for the product “spread like wildfire.”

“With Oracle, you can’t mix dollars and tons in a column, but GL Wand gives us the flexibility to do that. As a result, our reports are smaller, simpler, with all the information needed to quickly see where a certain operation stands.”Dependable Support – but Rarely Needed

Premier hasn’t had to call on Excel4apps software sup-port very often since installation, but when team mem-bers do occasionally, the help is quick and effective.

“We don’t need much support because GL Wand is so reliable and easy to use,” Della said. “Once I had a prob-lem and sent Excel4apps a quick e-mail about it. They got back to me within the hour.”

Foundation for the Future

With large reserves of coal, a modern mining operation, highly trained employees and effective management systems like the ones described here, Premier Coal has a firm foundation for supplying energy well into the 21st century. In addition, the company is recognized as a leader in environmental management and has a certi-fied ISO 14001 environmental management system. Its safety systems are also certified with accreditation under the standard AS/NZS 4801.

Premier was part of Wesfarmers Limited, one of Australia’s largest public companies, and was purchased in 2011 by the Chinese-owned Yancoal Group, which runs SAP as its ERP system. Della is confident that, should Premier convert from Oracle to SAP, it will still be able to use GL Wand for reporting.

“To move to another ERP system is quite a big thing, and the reports will be the biggest challenge, but because there is GL Wand for SAP, it won’t be a problem,” Della said.

Premier has supported Della’s enthusiastic advocacy for GL Wand, and she has presented and spoken about it whenever possible. “I recently met an employee from the Department of Commerce who had just installed GL Wand. I asked if he had found a life now that he uses GL Wand, and he said, ‘Yes.’ This product makes a tremen-dous difference for financial and accounting teams. You can’t run your business if you can’t get the information you need, and GL Wand delivers. It’s a fantastic product.”

Premier especially looks forward to installing the new GL Wand 5, which takes the best functional elements from its successful predecessor and wraps them into a com-pletely new Java-based framework, designed exclusively for the strengths of an Oracle environment. “We look for-ward to even faster reporting and new functions and se-curity features,” Della said.

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Excel4apps is a best-in-class provider of Excel-based reporting, inquiry, and budget-loading software for Oracle and SAP. Designed for finance professionals, its award-winning GL Wand, Reports Wand, Budget Wand, and Sales Wand products easily and securely deliver real-time ERP data using Microsoft Excel® to save reporting time and effort. Excel4apps serves over 13,000 Oracle and SAP users in 61 countries, with offices in Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and South Africa.

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“When we found GL Wand, we drastically improved financial reporting. We could plan, develop and analyze reports easily. We produced reports in hours rather than days. All of our reporting—trial balances, monthly reports, ad hoc reports, everything—is now done out of GL Wand through its easy Excel interface.” Sue Della, Premier Coal Limited