CASE STUDY

overview

This Top Canadian Law Firm traces its roots back more than 120 years to Canada’s emergence as a major industrialized nation. Today, some 180
lawyers–backed by a professional staff of over 200–help clients seize opportunities, overcome challenges, and develop creative strategies to meet their most demanding business objectives. The lawyers of this top Canadian
Law Firm are a unique group of individuals who share a common
entrepreneurial spirit. Whether they articled at the firm or moved there from another firm, whether they have been with the firm two years or twenty, they thrive on fast-paced, ground-breaking work, and believe in implementing
best-of-breed technology to support the achievement of their strategic business goals.

business challenge

Provide their financial analysts and management team with a Business Performance Management solution that allows them to :

• Centralize data from Elite in a data warehouse to support current future business performance management projects
• Access one data source using one application framework and one interface to streamline and automate financial compensation calculations,reporting, and analysis.
• Reduce the labor-intensive process of generating partner compensation reports from multiple weeks to a matter of a few workdays.
• Leverage the investment and work performed in the partner compensation project in additional project phases; specifically, Financial Reporting and Budgeting. Analysis,

SOLUTION – POWEREXCEL FOR PARTNER
COMPENSATION

Collaborating as an integrated unit, this Top Canadian Law Firm & PARIS
Technologies performed a Needs Assessment, defined the project
requirements, and created a blueprint for the design development and
integration of a multi-phased PowerExcel implementation.

PHASE 1: THE PARTNER COMPENSATION
CALCULATION AND REPORTING CHALLENGE

Phase 1 of the challenge, developing a centralized data warehouse and
integrating PowerExcel for partner compensation and reporting, was
completed in the brief period of 6 weeks, “It is amazing to see how the BPM
technology is already allowing us to experience new efficiencies and
productivity gains. Before PowerExcel, we had to manually generate numerous
reports for use in our partnership compensation calculations. It sounds like a
small task, but gathering the data, keying it into MS Excel, analyzing it, and
correcting it almost shut us downfor a month,” stated the Controller at the
Cassels Brock. “With PowerExcel, we are already able to access real-time data
via the warehouse and exploit PowerExcel to generate more comprehensive
reports and perform compensation calculations with our business logic.
We’ve not only reduced the number of required reports from 12 to 5, but we are
spending considerably more time analyzing data instead of gathering it.
PowerExcel has allowed us to divert individuals to perform their core tasks,
and this means they are better supporting the firm as a whole as well as our
clients. I am also pleased to report that we have reduced a grueling 3-4 week,
late night, and weekend task to approximately 3 workdays! Preparing  the
reports and electronically distributing them across the enterprise has been
equally impressive and automated through the use of PowerExcel Publisher.

” The benefits of using PowerExcel to support the partner compensation process
go well beyond speed, ease of use, and general productivity. According to the
controller, “PowerExcel’s multidimensional capabilities are instrumental in
providing the management team at our Top Law Firm with various views of a
partner’s annual contributions to the firm. Rather than arriving at conclusions
based on restricted views of static data, management is now able to review an
up-to-the-minute, comprehensive picture of the partner’s and firm’s collective
performance. This is what business performance management is all about, and
I can’t imagine doing this task without PowerExcel.”

REALIZING AN EARLY ROI ON EXISTING SYSTEMS
VIA POWEREXCEL:

PowerExcel has a reputation for delivering a rapid return on the initial
investment to customers, “Like most firms, we have made substantial
investments in recent years to better manage our firm. The PowerExcel BPM
solution clearly retrieves a true ROI on prior investments in core financial and
operational systems through unprecedented access to accurate,
real-time data,” commented the Managing Director.
“I am confident in our ability to exploit our investments in PowerExcel to
fulfill the next two phases of our multi-phase project: Financial Reporting &
Budgeting. I look forward to breaking into this new BPM ground.”