J & E Davy: Optimising operations by moving to the cloud

For nearly a century, J & E Davy Unlimited Company has provided wealth creation and investment opportunities to generations of people in Ireland and beyond.

Adding value through a move to the cloud and standardised processes

With its extensive experience in connecting capital with opportunity, J & E Davy has earned a reputation internationally for helping clients preserve their wealth and investments. The firm’s goal is to achieve exceptional outcomes for its clients, many of whom have trusted the firm with their investments for generations.

To further help its clients maximise their wealth, Davy wanted to update and standardise its financial processes with a modern cloud solution. With a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, the firm envisioned having greater insights and intelligence that would fuel the strategic value and innovation of its client offerings.

Davy also hoped that its financial team would have more agility and flexibility and no longer need to manage a static legacy ERP system that was outdated and difficult to update. The firm wanted to free up time for the team so that it could more effectively analyse and prepare enterprise data and related analyses that would help executive management decision-making and planning related to client services. Furthermore, Davy was looking for external resources to provide implementation guidance and services.

Creating a more agile and adaptive way to do business

For J & E Davy’s cloud transformation and the standardisation of its financial operations, the firm chose an SAP cloud ERP solution. Davy elected to use SAP partner Delaware UK & Ireland to manage the overall deployment and SAP Preferred Success services to provide guidance and perspective on the technical and end-user part of the implementation.

As an enterprise management solution, SAP Cloud ERP brings proven industry best practices and preconfigured processes to the firm. Delaware helped Davy accelerate the solution’s implementation through the use of the SAP Cloud ALM tool, which provides application lifecycle management technology. 

With the help of SAP’s services team and SAP Preferred Success, the adoption and value of SAP Cloud ERP was accelerated. Prior to the implementation, SAP held regular advisory meetings with the Davy team and Delaware to address the firm’s strategic and technical needs. Together, the implementation team addressed topics such as:

The services team also consulted with Davy on how to integrate SAP Cloud ERP and the SAP Concur portfolio, which was already at use in the firm for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management. 

To help users better understand and adapt to Davy’s new self-serve business processes, the implementation included the use of the SAP Activate methodology. 

SAP Activate provided the financial team with a structured adoption process and solution-specific best practices along with extensive training resources. Emmet noted that the methodology enabled the firm to plan better and see what resources would be needed at certain points throughout the implementation.

Elevating client service with greater intelligence and insights

Thanks to SAP Cloud ERP and the flexibility it provides, Davy has modernised financial processes that help the firm provide more value to clients through innovative and timely offerings. 

The financial team has more efficient day-today operations, with much shorter time frames for processes such as monthly and annual reporting. This leaves them with greater capacity for strategic data analysis and quicker responses to client needs when they arise.

In addition, with the greater ease of use that comes with the new system, preparing for Davy’s year-end audit was more efficient, as the financial team can navigate the self-service system easily. 

“Because it’s a cloud-based solution, SAP Cloud ERP doesn’t require much maintenance, especially as there are biannual upgrades that include the latest functionality,” shares Emmet. “But SAP still plays a large role in the upkeep and maintenance of our system, which allows us more time to spend on adopting the new innovations that come with each update"

Building a strong future to service many more generations of clients

Davy is pleased with its investment in SAP solutions and the services provided by Delaware and through SAP Preferred Success. With the help of SAP and Delaware, Davy now has a clear path forward for future investments that will continue to accelerate the momentum they have created.

“There’s a lot of opportunity within the system for us to build on going forward,” says Emmet. “We have already identified functionality we are not currently using and areas we want to work on in the short term, such as broadening our scope of reporting as we collect more data. We now have a good tool in place that’s constantly evolving. Over the next couple of years, we’ll continually be implementing new functionality, including artificial intelligence where appropriate.”

Accelerating Davy's cloud vision

As a platinum SAP partner, we brought our extensive experience and collaborative support to help J & E Davy realise its vision for a new cloud solution. We worked closely with their team to accelerate the timely implementation of SAP Cloud ERP, ensuring they met their targeted schedule. Furthermore, we quickly resolved any issues that arose during deployment, providing the firm with a robust foundation for future growth.