Robert Horne – the UK’s leading paper merchant – exploits Datawatch’s Monarch software to automate financial reporting. Datawatch's Monarch report mining software and Robert Horne Group Limited prove that you can perfect your business process management without investing in expensive new technology, by combining and mining totally separate databases to produce seamless reports.

It has never been more important for organisations to have control over their data. Every organisation has operational information management requirements – from CRM to ERP and financials. Getting the right information from these systems is essential to enable managers to make well-informed business decisions – management without information is not management.

Of growing importance is the ability of an organisation’s information systems to demonstrate compliance with the numerous legal requirements that affect businesses since the collapse of Enron. Foremost among these, for companies operating internationally. is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act from the US, which imposes stringent requirements on CEOs and CFOs to prove that their financial reporting is not only accurate but demonstrably so.

Many CIOs, faced with these same challenges, are urged by vendors to deploy costly new MIS systems, despite their organisations already having invested in systems to address their business goals. Datawatch takes a different approach, developing a range of software from desk-top solutions to enterprise-wide portals which fit into an organisation’s existing IT environment. Without the need for any hardware or programming resources, Datawatch’s products enable managers to transform data from any system into meaningful information.

Robert Horne, part of the Australian-based PaperlinX group, deployed Datawatch’s Monarch software as part of a business process re-engineering. With two mainframe systems already installed, they needed to extract data from multiple sources, combine it and deliver the information to managers around the organisation.

In the past, hardcopy reports had been generated from the mainframe systems, which had to be manually re-keyed for analysis, or read through at length by managers. Duncan Borland, Computer Services Manager, had used Monarch in a previous role to extract billing report data from an IBM AS/400 system, and demonstrated the product to colleagues when he joined Robert Horne in 1997.

Robert Horne deployed Monarch, and Duncan now says "It is just the tool we need. “I demonstrated Monarch as part of a project to improve data analysis and it was almost like switching a light on as the potential benefits were realized. We set about building templates to handle the reports we needed to analyse, and now the whole process runs almost automatically."

As in every finance department, monthly reports are critically important, and the quicker these can be produced the faster management can respond. Duncan comments “With the aid of Monarch, we have been able to reduce the number of days reporting at the end of the month by 4 days. Without Monarch in our toolbox, this would have been extremely difficult to achieve within normal working hours. Our finance team would have to work 24 hours a day to achieve the same result!"

Faster generation of management information is only one benefit that Monarch delivers. Duncan notes that re-keying of data is a thing of the past, improving accuracy, and that Monarch’s ability to transform report data into Excel spreadsheets has seen these being emailed directly to the managers who need the data.

What used to take programmers days to extract from the mainframe and transform into CSV files, he claims, “Monarch now does in minutes. As a result, improved information on debtors has enabled more efficient cash management which is a definite benefit and we are printing less of the huge traditional reports that may have ended up in the bin."

Datawatch’s Monarch software enables managers to mine report data and transform it into information. With Monarch, business processes can be improved and compliance issues dealt with, without additional recourse to the new hardware or progamming resources. As Duncan says, “With Monarch, we are no longer wading through data, but at last are able to use it.”

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