William Hill Streamlines Migration to Oracle Cloud with Angles Professional

In Brief

• William Hill has been a loyal insightsoftware customer for 20 years
• The organization is migrating from JDE to Oracle ERP Cloud
• Oracle’s native reporting tools could not meet finance team needs
• William Hill partnered with insightsoftware to consult in the building of Angles Professional to solve its reporting challenges
• William Hill is already elevating its reporting game with Angles Professional, smoothing over many pain points associated with cloud migration

William Hill is one of the world’s leading betting and gaming companies, employing over 12,500 people. Its origins are in the UK where it was founded in 1934, and where the company is listed on the London Stock Exchange. With headquarters in London and Leeds it has a national presence of licensed betting offices in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In 2022, William Hill was acquired by 888 Holdings plc, another global leader in online betting and gaming.

For many years, William Hill’s financial processes revolved around its JD Edwards ERP, backed by the reporting power of Hubble. Users loved the in-depth, real-time reporting capabilities offered by Hubble. The pre-built content enabled Finance users to self-serve when they needed a new report from JDE. This collaborative approach fostered a strong and innovative partnership. When it came time for William Hill to migrate to Oracle Cloud, Head of Group Finance Systems, Vip Sharma, knew it was time to seek a cloud application that could reduce the impact of this transition and eventually elevate his team’s reporting and analytics capabilities.

“We saw the opportunities migrating to a cloud ERP could provide, but really didn’t want our reporting to take a step back,” said Vip. “Transitioning to all new systems is hard on the team and you tend to see a lag or drop in reporting due to the steep learning curve. We recognized that integrating a new reporting tool could dramatically reduce the time it would take to start seeing value from our new data system.”

Native Tools Couldn’t Deliver

While Oracle ERP Cloud comes with its own native reporting tool (OTBI), Vip found that this would not offer the full range of capabilities that his team had become accustomed to with Hubble.

“At William Hill, we have not used a development team to drive reporting output from JDE. It is not an efficient or sustainable model for a finance department who require instant information at period ends,” he explained. “The key to choosing Angles revolved around the need for a similar end user tool that could not only serve the finance team, but elevate it to the next level and produce KPIs and dashboards directly from within the reporting tool.”

“OTBI is a technical tool, which isn’t flexible enough for my users and has very little pre-built content,” Vip continued. “It would require a lot of work post migration to get back to where we left off with Hubble and I didn’t want those challenges delaying the team’s output. We needed a true end user reporting solution that would make it easy for Finance to get reports and KPIs from the new system.”

“We had been successfully using Hubble over JDE for over 20 years and were keen to stay with insightsoftware if we could make it work. The kicker was that I wanted to improve, not just maintain, our reporting capabilities. The new tool had to be more advanced, intuitive, and flexible than anything we’d used before. I presented this idea to our partners at insightsoftware and it became clear that we were on a path to developing an all-new tool together, specifically to overcome the reporting challenges of an Oracle Cloud migration.”

“It’s been an interesting process, developing Angles Professional for Oracle Cloud in partnership with insightsoftware. They listened to my team’s needs and are building a solution that solves many major pain points I know are common across our industry.”

An Angle for Success

After working closely with Vip, we gave his team a demo of our new financial and operational reporting solution, Angles Professional, and they were blown away.

“As soon as we saw Angles’ sleek opening interface, we knew that it was the right cloud tool to support our ERP migration. insightsoftware had done a great job building and enabling a base of pre-built reports that were tailored to our business needs. It was clear that after a bit of training, the team would not have to miss a beat to start generating value from our new ERP.”

There were a few big-ticket features that made Angles Professional the obvious choice for William Hill.

• Pre-built content. The chosen solution needed to provide the team with all the basic reports required to maintain output throughout the migration. Angles Professional provided all this and more, immediately offering the team AP, AR and purchasing reports.
• Multi data source connectivity. William Hill stores data across multiple systems and spreadsheets. Angles can combine this data with live actuals to give the team a real-time view of business health.
• User friendly. Angles offered the team an elevated, modern reporting and analysis user experience. This was very exciting for them as they can now generate engaging visualizations, KPI reports and comprehensive report packs.
• No more Excel data dumps. Angles connects directly to source data in Oracle Cloud, as well as an array of other data sources, removing the need for the team to manually extract or upload data. This is a huge time saver and gives them a single source of truth from Oracle Cloud.
• Self-service capabilities. The team at William Hill can now seek answers to their own reporting questions with Angles’ intuitive reporting that makes it easy to slice and dice data to dive deeper into costs. Drag-and-drop editing, rich visualizations and intuitive interactivity allow users to refresh their reports at any time so they can explore the latest data to get timely answers to their key questions.
• Trust in data. Angles reports connect directly to source data, significantly boosting trust in the results. No more double-checking spreadsheets for errors or submitting analysis that’s already a week old. The key stakeholders at William Hill are now confident in the accuracy of results.

Looking to the Future

William Hill is gearing up to implement its new ERP, Oracle Cloud, while continuing the ongoing successful partnership with insightsoftware team to optimize Angles Professional and build out its functionality. In the future, Vip would like to combine all data sources through Angles, offering a true single source of financial and operational information across the entire business. As his team’s skills grow, he sees the use-cases for Angles expanding to touch more areas of finance and the business at large.

If you’d like to learn more about how Angles Professional can streamline your financial and operational reporting and analysis, please visit our website to set up a demo.