Financial reporting & management.

• Position: Technology Tools

Cetova Corp. has released C-FAR (Cetova Financial Analysis and Reporting), which it calls the first comprehensive financial intelligence application to provide integrated, Web-enabled financial analytics and production reporting without the high cost and maintenance of business intelligence and data warehousing platforms.

Cetova vice president Brian O'Kelley says that "CIOs are already realizing benefits from C-FAR because our solution pulls its numbers directly from their ERP systems -- without major infrastructure investments or IT staff involvement. Financial executives appreciate its simplicity, accuracy and superior analysis capabilities."

O'Kelley added that C-FAR provides real-time report generation for faster decision-making; seamless integration with major ERP systems like SAP, J.D. Edwards, Oracle or Lawson; assured accuracy with account and report validation; elimination of manual processes; and robust security Maintenance and user training requirements are minimal, O'Kelley says, with half-day training sessions adequate for most users. Installations can be completed in as little as two weeks, he adds.

Ausimont USA, a leading U.S. fluorochemicals company, completed a soup-to-nuts implementation of C-FAR in less than 30 days. The decision to use C-FAR was based on the need to provide non-technical users with the ability to be self-sufficient. The finance organization did not have the technical expertise to generate reports or analyze information from its ERP system. Additionally, the company had consolidation reporting requirements for Solvay, its new parent company, that could not be completed in the requested timeframe. With C-FAR, the entire finance staff can write reports and leverage financial information.

Mike Lacey, Ausimont's president and CEO (and former CFO), said in an interview that the company's system of J.D. Edwards Financials and Prism, a software application for process manufacturing, made it "very hard to sit on top of those two systems and extract data -- and calculating return on investment was particularly difficult." In effect, he said, users would have to create a "portable data warehouse" to do that analysis -- "and the typical user could never do that."

Lacey adds that he "had practically given up on getting ad hoc information." With C-FAR, he says, report queries can be written virtually on the fly. Now, six people in finance there are using the system regularly, creating and writing reports -- including...