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Fairfax, VA -- Each day, associates of ExxonMobil Oil's Supply & Trading division face a monumental task -- managing the scheduling and transportation of petroleum for one of the world's largest oil companies. To streamline the financial transactions and settlement processes associated with the trading of raw materials, ExxonMobil sought a general ledger and accounts receivable package to integrate with a new global energy system used in Fairfax as well as London and Singapore.
One of the requirements of the new system was to eliminate "handoffs", according to John Crane, controller coordinator of the global trading project. Crane defined a handoff as any transaction data forced to transfer from one ExxonMobil employee to another on a separate system. This forced departments to touch the same transaction more than once. "We wanted a system that could handle transactions seamlessly, from generating price feeds to recording accounting entries," Crane said.
Crane added that drill-back capabilities, reporting flexibility and real-time updates were also high priorities. To a lesser extent, multi-currency support was needed, too, as foreign exchange gains and losses were being handled by a separate PC-based system.
The project team evaluated accounting packages that were compatible with multiple relational databases, then selected the General Ledger and Accounts Receivable modules from Skylight Systems, Inc. The modules, part of Skylight's Relational Financial Systems (RFS) suite of applications, are running on Hewlett Packard 9000 clients with a Motif graphical user interface, accessing a Sybase relational database on an HP9000-based server.
Crane said that ExxonMobil chose RFS because "its architecture was able to adapt to our technology. Other vendors were flexible only within their own framework. When they tried to integrate outside their own systems, constraints appeared that made them less powerful." After reviewing RFS, ExxonMobil selected Passport, the application development tool in which RFS was written, to develop the entire trading system.
Another key factor in selecting RFS, Crane added, was that Skylight staff demonstrated expert knowledge of Motif, Passport and Sybase. Skylight Systems began providing consulting services to the project in May, 1994. "They were our mentors [of the new technology] in the beginning," Crane said.
Following their brief education, teams of developers and systems integrators worked alongside Skylight consultants to solve a number of integration challenges, explained Gina Cristiano, senior consultant at Skylight. As an example, she described how the RFS G/L posting process was customized for ExxonMobil's system. "We needed to replace the RFS method of posting cash disbursements, sales, and purchases to the general ledger," Cristiano said.
The new posting process had to satisfy two conditions: making sure the system could process large amounts of data as quickly as possible, and incorporating specific business rules. "ExxonMobil wanted as few journal vouchers created as possible to eventually feed into their corporate General Ledger," Cristiano said. The end-result is a process that includes a great deal of flexibility. "The post to G/L process runs daily to pick up certain sales and purchases, but the bulk of the posting is done during end of month processing," Cristiano said. The process automatically posts data to different ExxonMobil companies (each company is responsible for reporting financial results independently), and users can enter their own inter-company journal vouchers. For each accrual date, period, and ExxonMobil company, the system creates separate journal vouchers.
To satisfy ExxonMobil's desire for sophisticated drillback capabilities, the development team created a feature to roll up "like" G/L accounts so that a journal voucher has as few line items as possible. Users can then drillback from journal vouchers to see operational information detailing how the voucher originated. "We had to add structure columns to the database that would contain key fields to allow for drillbacks, and a new table to keep track of the roll-ups for each journal voucher," Cristiano said. The project developers emphasized easy access, allowing users to view roll-ups when a journal voucher is queried from the General Journal Entry Screen in RFS G/L. "What we did was provide two levels of detail: a summary window which lists general information about the rollup, and from there, access to detail information, which provides operational data such as trade information, pricing, and inventory," Cristiano said.
Additionally, the team added drillbacks from a sales related journal voucher to the invoice which is sent to the customer. The process to generate the customer's invoice had already been developed for the settlement module by another developer. "Passport allowed us to include this code as part of RFS G/L which saved us time from having to re-program," Cristiano said.
As G/L customizations were being successfully implemented, other development teams were ensuring tight integration between the RFS A/R and the ExxonMobil Settlement module. "One of the main reasons ExxonMobil chose RFS was its flexible architecture, as we designed modules to be easily integrated with external systems," explained Michael Rappaport, managing director of Skylight Systems. "The developers built 'hooks' into the software which allowed seamless real-time integration between the RFS A/R module and ExxonMobil's global energy system."
Rappaport said that invoices are created in Mobil's Settlement module and are available for cash application, inquiry and reporting in RFS A/R instantly. Such invoices, although created in Settlement, actually reside in the RFS database. "Thus, the primary integration between the modules exists at the server level," he said.
Similarly, Mobil's credit module looks to the RFS database for information regarding outstanding invoices and cash receipts, allowing credit analysts and traders to view up-to-the-minute data.
On the reporting side, RFS A/R reports were customized to include information from other modules in Mobil's system. Skylight and Mobil worked together to come up with standards regarding invoice numbers, revisions, foreign currency processing and general ledger distribution. "The integration that exists between RFS A/R and Mobil Settlement modules is as tight as that between any two modules within the RFS suite," Rappaport said.
As the project nears completion, Crane said that Skylight's contributions to the project have been significant. "They fully met our expectations, and provided jump-start technical expertise," Crane said. Based on the success thus far, Mobil plans to install the global energy system at the enclave offices in London and Singapore.
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