BC Ministry of Finance Manages US$30 billion CAD
Worth of Payments with UC4 and a Staff of Two

Customer Snapshot
Institution: BC Ministry of Finance
Business/Industry: Government, Finance  
Company Headquarters: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Webpage: www.gov.bc.ca
Budget: US$30 Billion CAD

The Institution
The BC Ministry of Management Services Corporate Accounting Services (CAS) provides value-added services to clients by offering and supporting a comprehensive suite of financial products in a stable and secure environment. CAS' clients are all government ministries, central agencies and independent offices, and one Crown Corporation (Land and Water BC Inc.). There are 24,000 Oracle Financials users made up of approximately 21,000 self-service users, and 3,000 inquiry and super users. 

The Challenge
With four million residents and a yearly government budget of over US$30 billion (CDN), the British Columbia Ministry of Finance had their hands full managing payments to and from almost every agency within the BC government.  

In 1991, the Ministry developed a Corporate Accounting System (CAS) to manage its financials and bookkeeping, running a variety of custom applications with 3rd party tools. As the system matured, they decided to migrate CAS into Oracle Financials to handle the increasing complexity and ever-expanding workload and to provide the scalability needed to meet future demands.

With approximately three million payments per year spread among 35 government entities (nearly all set up as individual Oracle orgs), CAS developers were facing a massive Oracle Financials rollout on a very tight timeline and with limited staff.  

The CAS team needed a solution that would eliminate manual submission of as many tasks as possible in order to maximize resources. They knew that writing scripts to automate these tasks would be nearly impossible given the timeframe, and completely impossible to maintain after the 'go-live' date. Processing errors were unacceptable since bad data could literally shut down the government's financial processes.  

The ideal solution would need to speed development time, streamline the migration from development to testing to production environments and provide sophisticated, flexible and utterly reliable scheduling.  

The Solution
After investigating several automation and scheduling packages, the Ministry found the solution they required in the UC4 platform.  

By implementing the UC4 platform during the development phase, the CAS team drastically reduced their projected Oracle Applications development using its object-oriented approach. The UC4 platform allows any executable program or script to become its own object or 'module'. Once developers define UC4 objects, they can reuse processes, pass dynamic parameters and create complex dependencies with a simple mouse click. Any code changes made to a UC4 object cascades throughout the system, eliminating maintenance headaches. And UC4 import/export functionality allows easy migrating changes between environments.

Capitalizing on the UC4 ability to interface with a huge variety of 3rd party and homegrown applications, it was no problem for the CAS team to automate nightly extracts and transforms from Oracle to the CAS data warehouse and to point the data warehouse back at the end-users allowing obtainment of up-to-date report information quickly and easily.  

"Most importantly, the UC4 platform monitors all of our financial processes, ensuring they complete successfully", says Brent Iverson, a senior software engineer at CAS. "If a job runs too long or fails we are automatically paged so we can fix any problems before they become critical."   

The Results
The CAS team met their deadline, brought Oracle Financials online and continues to flourish. Now on Oracle Financials 11i, with most ministries still as individual orgs, the big change has been the increase in the user load from 3000 to more than 24,000, with clients from all branches of the provincial government logging in to submit requests through Self Service (iProcurement and iExpenses) for expense vouchers, routine ordering and more.  

The UC4 platform provides CAS with world-class management capabilities, automating all AP, AR, GL and FA batch processes, handling external data transfers from 50 custom feeder systems at various ministries into a homegrown verification system and delivering data to a custom payment management facility.  

"There is no business process that we don't use the UC4 platform for", says Iverson. "We no longer worry when someone asks us to bring a new process online. We just say, 'Yeah, we can do that', knowing the UC4 platform provides the flexibility to let us accomplish nearly anything we can imagine."  

UC4 Benefits

• Accelerated business process through efficient use of technology
• Increased efficiency through automation
• Robust error reporting keeps Operations staff aware of problems
• Role-based security
• Utilizes existing IT infrastructure
• Automates run book 

"We no longer worry when someone asks us to bring a new process online. We just say, 'Yeah, we can do that', knowing the UC4 platform provides the flexibility to let us accomplish nearly anything we can imagine."
Brent Iverson, Senior Software Engineer
BC Ministry, Canada