As a Fortune 500 manufacturing client moved to provide a "single face" to their customers, consolidated order management and billing typically produced a single order containing products and services from various divisions within the company.

The consolidation of information made the provision of data needed to effectively manage and provide accurate financial reporting for each individual division quite challenging. With items from various divisions included together in a single invoice, an accurate and equitable method to allocate common revenue, discounts and charges, such as freight and handling, back to each individual division needed to be developed. Without this process in place management decisions would potentially be based on information not reflecting the true performance of each division within the company.

In under 90 days, Alliance Data used its rapid development methodology and system architecture to design, develop, and deploy a solution to interface with the company's sales order system and to appropriately allocate revenue, cost and charges to each division within the company for every customer invoice. Both a standard set of periodic reports, as well as a secure web-based ad hoc reporting interface, were provided to support the resulting financial information.

It was crucial that Alliance Data deliver a solution where the output not only accurately reflected the allocation method implemented, but also provided timely and accurate reporting to support the credibility of the resulting financial information. The solution was delivered on schedule within three months, with the resulting output reflected in the corporate financials shortly thereafter. Today, Alliance Data provides on-going management and support of the system which, because of its user-friendly access to sales order data, has grown its user-base far beyond its original scope.