Skanska builds speed and agility with Oracle Cloud
“Before, people had to go to IT and order financial analytics reports. When we launched Oracle Analytics, the big difference from then to now is that we are on self-service analytics, which reduces the old process from one and half days to five minutes. You are getting into augmented analytics, so the solution is actually helping you analyze your data.”
Business challenges
Construction and development require a significant amount of financing and well as tracking and logistics to manage the complexity of each project. For Skanska, those projects involve countless data sets covering everything from banks to supplier materials to live project data. For Conny Bjorling, Skanska’s head of enterprise architecture, implementing the latest technology is imperative to innovation. And enabling the company’s business users to quickly access data and reporting was important to support new and existing global processes.
There were two projects Skanska needed to implement. The first was a financial reporting solution for global business users that required self-service access to data and reporting.
Another project, called the Sanction List, was required to meet bank compliance requirements for project funding. Skanska needed to verify that none of banks were forbidden and were not on any of the global sanction lists. With so many international sanctions and organizations in the world, any manual effort to cross-reference this data daily was close to impossible.
There were two key drivers to find solutions. First, regardless of any time saved, a solution would work only if it involved automation to facilitate routine tasks for the IT staff. Second, Skanska needed self-service access for business users with minimal IT support. With those key drivers, Bjorling and the Skanska team examined options for a solution capable of fulfilling these needs.
Why Skanska Chose Oracle
After weighing various enterprise solutions, Bjorling and his team selected Oracle Cloud to build artificial intelligence into its enterprise infrastructure to deliver innovation.
Skanska wanted to take advantage of Oracle Analytics, Oracle Integration and Oracle Database Cloud machine learning to connect data from a variety of sources and automated processes, but with less administration to accelerate business insights.
Results
After purchasing Oracle Analytics for the finance reporting solution, Bjorling and his team expected an integration and ramp-up period of months. However, Oracle Analytics integrated into Skanska’s architecture so smoothly that the financial reporting solution was up and running in only 17 days, ultimately providing automation and self-service without any drain on resources.
From a functional level, user productivity significantly improved. Previously, compiling data for a report could take up to two days. Instead of IT spending a day and half searching for, analyzing, and compiling data, automation improved reporting processes by 4X to 6X.
Business users are now empowered to generate their own analytic reports in less than five minutes, whereas in the past it would have taken a day and a half. Thanks to a simpler user interface with search and filter capabilities, users are less dependent on IT.
For the Sanction List project, leveraging Oracle Analytics, Oracle Database Cloud, and Data Integration, users can quickly match more than 2,000 profiles of compliant customers and suppliers to make suggestions for Skanska to make faster, fairer financing decisions. Even with 23 data sources integrated, Database Cloud with machine learning loads all the data faster and auto-scales for greater performance and cost savings.
Ultimately, integrating Oracle Cloud reduced costs, mitigated risk, fulfilled business user needs, and delivered solutions to help Skanska build a better society.