AT&T creates P&L reports 40% faster with Oracle Financial Services
The telecommunications company speeds up P&L reports and boosts work-life balance with Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management.
“Vendors always promise that their solutions will accelerate processes. Oracle really delivered and then some. We’re completing fully allocated P&L’s on average 40% faster, consistently meeting service level agreements, and gaining time for valuable analysis.”
Business challenges
A pioneer in the telecommunications industry, AT&T has been changing the way people live, work, and play for more than 140 years. Today, AT&T is a massive enterprise, serving nearly three million business customers and over 100 million consumers with high-speed and highly secure mobile and broadband connectivity.
Speed is paramount in the world of telecommunications—permeating every aspect of business operations, including management reporting. AT&T’s legacy profitability management system was nearing end of life, and the company saw a timely opportunity to elevate the speed and depth of business reporting across its mobile and wire-line businesses, which together encompass tens of thousands of cost centers.
Profit and loss (P&L) report production for the mobility group averaged three days. The extensive report spans five dimensions—geography, product/service, sales channel, device, and customer type (business or consumer)—and teams worked long hours to ensure complete and timely report delivery. In addition, team members used spreadsheets to manually pass financial costs that spanned multiple business groups, which introduced more complexity into the process.
AT&T needed an industrial-grade solution for profitability reporting. The management reporting group also wanted to spend more time dedicated to analysis but was constrained by extended production timelines. To achieve its reporting goals, AT&T needed to accelerate and fully automate its reporting process.
Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management has proven its power. Our internal clients are happier, our team members are happier, and we’re producing more detailed allocations at record speed.
Why AT&T chose Oracle
After an extensive evaluation process, AT&T selected Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management after determining that the system stood alone in its ability to manage extreme volumes while also providing a 360-degree view of risk-adjusted profitability.
Results
Working with Oracle Financial Services Consulting, AT&T migrated from its legacy Oracle profitability reporting solution to Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management in late 2021. Now, AT&T’s management reporting group completes P&L reporting 40% faster, producing the critical business reports in approximately two days. For revenue reporting, AT&T cut the processing window from 38 hours to five hours.
In addition to accelerating data processing, AT&T has automated allocations that span multiple lines of business and affiliates, thereby reducing its reliance on spreadsheets and improving speed and accuracy.
The team now has an extended window to prepare data and rerun allocations when needed to ensure optimal quality. Further, it consistently meets its report delivery service level agreements, supporting management’s ability to make timely decisions.
In addition, team members no longer spend long days and nights on the job during the allocations cycle, improving their work-life balance. They have significantly more time to analyze reports, which has improved overall reporting quality for senior leadership.
The management report group relies on Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management’s extensive audit trail capabilities, which enables them to identify key data interdependencies and achieve a more granular review of results.
AT&T anticipates that the modern solution will require fewer resources to manage and maintain, freeing team members for other value-add and strategic responsibilities.
Partners
Oracle Financial Services Consulting assisted AT&T with the implementation.