Honeywell is a global controls company providing products, systems, and services that enhance comfort, protect the environment, conserve energy, and increase productivity and safety in homes, buildings, industry, aviation, and the field of space exploration and research. In 1995, Honeywell reported sales of $6.7 billion.
Honeywell wanted a high-performance remote computing solution for quick, easy, and cost-effective deployment of its Hyperion Enterprise financial application to affiliate offices worldwide. At the same time, Honeywell needed to maintain centralized administration and support.
Honeywell’s implementation of a thin-client/server solution using the WinFrame server has helped the company to consolidate mission-critical financial information into a single, centrally administered system.
Presenting problem Honeywell employs 50,000 people in 95 countries on 6 continents. When a company this size wants to consolidate monthly financial results from subsidiaries around the world, it faces a serious challenge.
The challenge: Apply a single downsized solution to global financial reporting.
Honeywell’s European operation is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and encompasses 65 reporting units and 12,000 employees in 24 different countries, including eastern Europe, South Africa, and the Arab states. In 1995, Honeywell Europe S. A. reported sales of $1.9 billion.
Collating financial results from such geographically separated locations presented Honeywell with an administrative nightmare. Just compiling the data took days—analyzing it and consolidating it into informative reports took even longer.
For the past 15 years, Honeywell’s corporate headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and its European headquarters in Brussels had used separate mainframe computer and minicomputer systems for financial planning and reporting. Early in 1995, however, the company decided to move away from these proprietary systems to a single packaged solution based on less expensive PC technology.
Having experienced previous success using Hyperion’s Micro Control product to assist in the reporting process, Honeywell’s U.S. corporate headquarters selected Hyperion Enterprise for its financial reporting system as it downsized to a PC-based platform. Hyperion Enterprise controls the reporting and consolidation of financial information at the U.S. and European corporate headquarters, which are directly linked.
Hardware and software The networking environment at Honeywell includes:
Honeywell deploys financial software through a WAN.
Honeywell uses WinFrame Enterprise to deploy Hyperion Enterprise financial software to its remote affiliates over dial-up and WAN connections.
Solution and results The company faced the challenge of having insufficient bandwidth for remote locations to access Hyperion Enterprise from a single, consolidated platform over its existing WAN and dial-up connections.
Honeywell’s solution was to deploy the Hyperion financial application to remote users using a thin-client/server model. By using the WinFrame server’s thin-client network-centric architecture, Honeywell affiliates were able to connect to U.S. and European headquarters and gain LAN-like access to mission-critical applications, such as Hyperion Enterprise, and to use them to report monthly financial results.
Honeywell’s strategic implementation of WinFrame resulted in a number of improvements for its financial organization, including allowing remote offices worldwide to simultaneously access and work with one consolidated financial database. This capability alone offered greater overall efficiency, consistency, and accuracy in gathering and analyzing financial results. Since each remote user could access and share a single financial database system, administration and maintenance costs were significantly reduced for each office.
Honeywell’s thin-client/server implementation significantly improved the quality of financial information.
Currently, Honeywell has four WinFrame application servers in Brussels and one in Minneapolis. Each Honeywell sales office and factory also connects to WinFrame via WAN or dial-up connections at the end of every month to access the Hyperion database and input financial results for global consolidation.
According to IS managers at Honeywell, WinFrame has equipped them with a unique way of entering large amounts of data into a Windows-based system without having to upgrade the existing communications infrastructure. Previous reporting systems had involved developing and maintaining a mainframe consolidation application, a costly venture. With WinFrame, costs were dramatically reduced. Honeywell also realized significant savings by running the application with network-centric PC-based technology provided by a thin-client/server solution using WinFrame, as opposed to using two different mainframe systems.
The thin-client/server solution gave Honeywell employees—regardless of their location—global access to consolidated financial figures. Within just a few days of implementing the solution, Honeywell was able to consolidate its affiliates’ data to produce a global picture that reflected overall monthly performance.
Through the use of WinFrame and the Hyperion database, Honeywell developed strategies and plans for the future by facilitating regular, up-to-date reports. The solution also offered quick and painless implementation to remote staff. The WinFrame/Hyperion project leader at Honeywell also lauded the capability of “shadowing” a user with WinFrame. Shadowing allows one user to follow another user’s WinFrame session. Using shadowing, an administrator can literally take over the screen, keyboard, and mouse of a remote user in order to troubleshoot problems.
The ability to shadow a user in Johannesburg from a desk in Brussels allowed administrators to give instant advice and to take corrective action in order to keep everyone using the system correctly. The WinFrame shadowing feature is equally useful for remote training, helping trainers to avoid costly travel expenses and time on the road.