Teekay Corp. Energizes Its Expense Reporting With BI Solution From T4G.

With a fleet of over 155 vessels, offices in 16 countries and 5,600 seagoing and shore-based employees, Teekay Corporation (NYSE: TK) provides a comprehensive set of marine services to the world's leading oil and gas companies, helping them seamlessly link their upstream energy production to their downstream processing operations. Teekay transports more than 10 per cent of the world's seaborne oil, has expanded into the liquefied natural gas shipping sector through its publicly-listed subsidiary, Teekay LNG Partners L.P. (NYSE: TGP), and is further growing its operations in the offshore production, storage and transportation sector through its publicly-listed subsidiary, Teekay Offshore Partners L.P. (NYSE: TOO). Teekay's reputation for safety, quality and innovation has earned it a position with its customers as The Marine Midstream Company.

T4G Limited is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a leader in the Business Intelligence services market with more than a decade building customized advanced BI solutions. Although T4G's expertise is not limited to the Microsoft BI platform, the company finds the market is more and more demanding high quality and trusted Business Intelligence solutions leveraging robust Microsoft technology.

Situation

Teekay Corporation is an international energy shipping and marine services company that ships more than 10 per cent of the world's crude oil and provides marine services to companies around the globe.

In the business of shipping, contracts can be set months or years in advance, restricting a company's ability to increase revenue for the current period. This results in a focus on managing expenses to increase profitability.

When Teekay wanted to increase visibility and control over its expenses, a pilot project was launched to test a solution for the problem, but budget was limited.

Garret Wong, Teekay's Integration Services manager knew that Business Intelligence was a good candidate for the solution, but there were two key issues to address. "Keeping costs low and not adding yet another software vendor to the group of vendors we were already managing were very important factors for us," Wong said.

"We understood both these priorities right from the beginning," said T4G President Geoff Flood. "And we delivered a customized, tailored solution in three months using existing software, in particular Microsoft technology, that has already paid for itself in savings to the corporation."

Solution

The solution leverages Teekay's existing investment in tools implemented in other areas of the company. With Microsoft tools, Teekay could use SQL Server's Analysis Services and Excel pivot tables to pilot their Operational Expenses or "OPEX" analysis project. Using in-house tools meant no cost for software and no new vendor relationships to manage.

Reporting of this financial data had traditionally been done by writing reports directly against their JD Edwards database. This approach not only required a detailed knowledge of finance and Teekay's custom implementation of JDE, but it was increasing the load on one of Teekay's largest and busiest applications.

When existing reports didn't satisfy requests from executives and vessel managers, the finance staff was left with the time consuming task of manually compiling and reviewing data from multiple reports and JDE extracts.

T4G Limited was brought in to implement Analysis Services and Excel and to build the Data Warehouse platform that would launch this pilot at Teekay. The challenge was to understand Teekay's business and meet all of the competing reporting requirements that the finance department was constantly faced with for expenses information.

Creating a data warehouse with a business-based model of Teekay's OPEX data was the platform for an Analysis Service cube that not only reduced the strain on their JDE Financial system, but created the kind of flexible solution that allowed the finance department to answer almost all expense-related ad-hoc business questions. In other words, finance staff could pull data easily that once they had to ask IT staff to do.

This vastly improved their visibility into expense data and greatly reduced the time spent by finance and IT creating complex reports. The increased visibility of their financial data has also allowed them to improve the data quality and has become an integral part of their quarter-end and year-end reporting.

"The use of Excel within our finance team was something very easy for us to adopt quickly and has given us the ability to track and control expenses like never before," said Reena Bains, Teekay's Director of Financial Systems in Vancouver.

This pilot project has been such a success that it is no longer considered a pilot and is being used in Teekay offices across North America, Europe and Asia. The use of these tools has also been expanded to cover similar functions in tracking and managing overhead costs for their world-wide operations.

Benefits

When it comes to tracking and controlling expenses, nothing is further from the truth than the old adage: "what you can't see can't hurt you." Today, thanks to this Microsoft-based BI solution, Teekay is seeing expenses like never before and the financial department is controlling costs better than ever. And there is far less strain on the overall IT infrastructure, including freeing up staff time to work on other projects. For Teekay, this is clearly the Intelligent Application of Technology!

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