Show me the money!

While it took the movie Jerry McGuire to make this phrase ubiquitous, anyone who has been in business for even a short time knows the mantra for success is, indeed, “show me the money.”

But if you’re in a global organization and are responsible for financials, performance management, analytics, and related global regulatory requirements, you know this isn’t an easy task, especially when your management team is breathing down your neck to show them the money. It’s even tougher if you have to manage multiple locations and disparate software systems, which produce too much data to manage manually.

To be successful, your global organization needs a comprehensive business management infrastructure that integrates operations seamlessly across the globe, provides real-time access to reporting, manages the complexities of global regulatory requirements, and can scale as your business grows. It’s a lot to ask. That’s why it's an advantage to have a solution partner who can work with you, arm in arm, to resolve issues and validate your solution design requirements.

Unified business management

Case in point: Manulife Financial. This Canada-based company provides a wide range of financial products and services, including life and health insurance, pensions, annuities, and mutual funds to institutions and individuals in the US, Canada, and Asia. Manulife has annual revenues of $40 billion, is represented in 19 countries (doing business as John Hancock in the US), and manages more than 650 million transactions per year.

Manulife needed a single solution to address all the unique requirements of a global ledger rollup. This includes different languages, currencies, and regulations, which make reporting, reconciliation, and management complex and time consuming. Increased scrutiny in the post-Enron financial services world — combined with Manulife’s rapid growth — necessitated a more robust, unified business management solution to replace the disparate, less-than-revealing spreadsheets it was maintaining.

So when Manulife’s long-time enterprise software provider, Infor, asked Manulife to be a beta customer for its enterprise technology platform for next-generation applications, called Infor Xi, Manulife jumped on it. Manulife assistant vice president Bill Coffin said:

It’s been a tremendous experience for us … we’ve seen the advantage of truly being able to bring everything into one place now.

By implementing the Infor Financials Xi platform, Manulife enjoys a unified ledger view, which consolidates data from across the global organization and provides opportunity for company-wide analysis. As Coffin explains in the video linked below, one source of data exists across all locations, which gives better support on the local office level. Manulife now has a solution that addresses the gap between online and off-line data, with out-of-the-box functionality, to solve a cross-industry problem.

Finally, Manulife’s management team can see the money.

There’s much more to the Manulife story and its experiences as an Infor beta customer in the interview below with assistant vice president Bill Coffin. 

Image credit: Tristar Pictures