Updated 3/27/01 Adrian Jones and Barbara J. Dalpra British Telecom Thursday, March 22, 2001 OAUG-Europe Conference British Telecom undergoes eAssets Revolution Day three of OAUG's European Conference featured a session by Adrian Jones and Barbara J. Dalpra from British Telecom entitled "Eliminate Online Input? Hide the Application? How? BT's eAssets Revolution!" With more than 100,000 locations, 28.5 million telephone lines, and 2.5 million assets, Jones explained that British Telecom has probably the largest Multi-Org Oracle Assets installation ever. More remarkably, this entire operation is managed without any online end-user involvement, yet over two million transactions are processed annually, including up to 100,000 new additions monthly. BT went live with Oracle Assets 11.0.3 CRL 3.1.1 in January 2001. This was a major undertaking as BT radically re-engineered its capital investment and end-to-end accounting processes with the goal of integrating applications, eliminating re-keying, increasing data quality, and improving processing efficiencies and people savings. Jones said that BT began its transition to where it is today more than fifteen years ago. In the past, BT's engineers designed applications software, but financials always took a back seat to network operations. In the 1970's BT introduced its first asset register system - each system was different and only covered one type of asset. In the early 1980s BT replaced early single asset register with two general-purpose systems. Despite the changes, BT's capital accounting process was still labor intensive with costs collected monthly for each job and manually record on paper forms. This manual process took place in over ninety separate accounting offices throughout the UK and involved more than 500 people. BT began its transformation through: Organisational Consolidation - from eighty geographically separate units to a single national structure based on function Process Standardisation - introduced a single, standard set of accounting processes These two processes saved BT more than fifty people, but three more problems became apparent. These problems consisted of: Not all data required was being captured at source when the transaction occurred Data being captured had to be input more than once into several different computer systems Data captured was not always complete or correct, mainly because of problems one and two Always trying to improve their financial processes, BT introduced a Project/Job costing system central to systems integration. This system helped BT reduce people costs by more than 60%. Even with the new project/job costing system, BT's finance department was still reprocessing data - they still needed to better integrate BT's finance and engineering systems. One positive from the integration to this point was that the number of finance people was halved from sixty-five to thirty-two. The answer to improve the system was to introduce a new, self-service, intranet front end, which eliminated a need for remaining central input by finance people. Once this was figured out, BT needed a way to verify assets, and track transfers, disposals, and retirements. Jones said the key to success was the alignment of individual asset records on the asset register with corresponding operational records on appropriate plant inventory. Once this was accomplished, BT began running regular (quarterly) comparisons of data with automated updates of changes identified. The final element necessary to complete BT's eAssets Revolution was the automation of all reference data update and maintenance. Because BT had built all of its own systems until the mid 1990s, BT finance already had built a central common reference data system to provide regular feeds of new/changed reference data to all BT's other finance systems. This includes automatically maintaining data for Chart of Accounts (Accounting Flexfield), Asset Categories, and Asset Locations. BT believes that its Oracle Assets install is the largest in the world, and maintained by the fewest on-line end users - none at all. This success is made possible because BT: Standardised account practices Integrated financial and operational systems 100% data capture/validation at source Very strong financial controls Aligned asset records with inventory systems Centralised reference data maintenance Ultimately BT's eAssets revolution has allowed BT to significantly increase data quality, while moving from 227 financial people in 1992 to eight in 2001. To view the white paper for this presentation, go to http://www.oaug.org/members/prot/db/euro2001pdf/Jones_Adrian.pdf.