Case Study: First American Maintains Corporate Hierarchy

The nation’s largest data provider, First American Corporation supplies businesses and consumers with information in connection with the major economic events of people’s lives, such as getting a job, securing a mortgage or opening a business. Headquartered in Santa Ana, California, this Fortune 500 company traces its history to 1889.

Challenge: Coordinate Corporate Hierarchy Info with Payroll

First American outsourced its payroll systems to Fidelity Investments. This was a major effort for a corporation with more than 35,000 employees. Outsourcing changed the internal procedures associated with payroll, including the way information about the corporate structure was maintained. The organizational hierarchy identifies the location of each employee in the First American organization. This is critical to the accounting involved with payroll.

The company maintained the corporate hierarchy information in an Excel spreadsheet, but it was difficult to preserve integrity between the spreadsheet and Fidelity. Sending updates to Fidelity was a cumbersome all-or-nothing proposition. The long-term goal of making this information available to offices across the country would be unobtainable with this method. Clearly, First American needed a better system.

Solution: CHAMP Maintains Hierarchy Information

RBZ&A created CHAMP (the Corporate Hierarchy All-Purpose Maintenance Program). This online ASP.NET application maintains the corporate organizational hierarchy from the highest level (the business group) to the lowest level (the department). The information is stored in an Oracle database. The constraints built into the application and the database ensure the integrity of the hierarchical data. With CHAMP, multiple people can update hierarchy information at the same time. Changes are available everywhere in real time. An extract process automatically collects the updates and sends them to Fidelity daily.

In short, the CHAMP application has enabled First American to easily manage an organizational structure consisting of more than 5,000 entities.

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