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Oracle Cloud Service:
from Excel files to
a software-as-a-service

DeA Capital Real Estate SGR is the leading asset management company in Italy specializing in real estate investment funds. In order to the regular and communicate purposes with investors, the business plan process of real estate funds is really important; this process was managed through Excel spreadsheets, with a high operational risk and a significant waste of time and resources. DeA Capital Real Estate SGR has chosen Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to speed up and automate the processes, making this transition with the Platinum Partner Oracle, Reply Consulting. Michele Cavallo Marincola, Head of Fund Planning at DeA Capital Real Estate SGR, comments enthusiastically: "We have gained a lot in efficiency and reliability".

Scenario

DeA Capital Real Estate SGR is an asset management company operating in real estate investment funds. From management controls point of view, this implies having access to income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements over the entire life of a fund (over 20 years) with the possibility of working at the individual tenant's details, contract, lease unit (real estate particle) to simulate the economic and financial effects of re-development interventions on particular properties/portions of real estate, extraordinary acquisition/sale transactions, new leases and the effects of macroeconomic variables such as inflation, interest rates, etc.

For years, the preparation and planning of these documents took place through the collection, reprocessing and verification of a myriad of Excel files scattered throughout the company network, a procedure that involved the use of 80% of the team work time and often it was not free from errors and inconsistencies. The same Michele Cavallo Marincola complained that "there was a clear problem of long time to find information and" build "the data and also the reliability of the data itself". Therefore, the primary need was to free the resources from management control for the collection, the insertion and manual processing of all the data, to take care of their real work: the analysis, which also reduced the time of the process and improving the reliability of the data.

Solution

The problem was solved through the use of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to automate the collection of data spread across different systems and numerous spreadsheets, merging them into a single central repository. Through this technology, the timing is significantly reduced and DeA Capital Real Estate SGR has been able to exploit other features of the Oracle Cloud solution such as: personalization and automation of workflows, cloud computing and financial intelligence, ad hoc analysis and integration native with the company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and in-depth tools with optimized user interfaces.

Leading the project was Simone Scagliarini, Senior Manager of Reply Consulting, who explained how "the solution in the Cloud has helped both the speed of delivery and change management, being the heir of Hyperion and Oracle solutions with a strong and consolidated integration with Excel, has allowed "re-use" the existing Excel ". The most evident result of the project is the passage of the drafting of business plans from a quarterly to a monthly frequency, the ease in managing what if scenarios and the reduction of the effort required for its production. So now financial analysts have a lot more time to work on new ideas and reports and produce more in-depth analysis.

  • Benefits

  • Speed

  • Reliability of the data

  • Workflow control

  • Efficiency

  • Easy to focus on

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    DeA Capital Real Estate SGR

    DeA Capital Real Estate SGR is the leading asset management company in Italy specializing in real estate investment funds. It has 9 billion assets under management and 41 real estate funds, of which 3 listed in the MIV segment, the Electronic Market of Investment Vehicles, of the Italian Stock Exchange. The controlling shareholder of Dea Capital Real Estate SGR is the De Agostini Group with 64.3%; Inps holds 29.7%, Carispezia Foundation 6%. The main characteristic of the corporate structure is the collaboration between private and public shareholders that allows DeA Capital Real Estate SGR to position itself as a privileged interlocutor with Italian and international institutional investors.

  • Reply Consulting

    Reply Consulting is the Reply group company specialized in Management Consulting services. Reply Consulting carries out for its Customers the role of integration and coordination between functional and technological aspects, guaranteeing an inter-functional approach, consultative methodologies and realization capacity. The distinctive skills of Reply Consulting are in the strategic management of the product / service-customer portfolio through support to the company's competitive positioning and implementation of the Business Plan; IPO services, supporting companies in the process of listing their shares at the Markets organized and managed by Borsa Italiana; Corporate Governance, Risk & Compliance; Definitions of the ICT strategy, Design and implementation of organizational structures and processes oriented to both business process improvement and cost reduction.

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