Financial Reporting & Consolidations for Oil & Gas Equipment Provider
overview
Delivered a financial reporting and consolidations solution in a multi-currency and multi-account environment. As one of the leading global equipment service and pipeline construction companies, the customer faced numerous challenges related to monthly financial consolidation processing. In preparation for the opportunities and demands of being part of a publicly held company, the customer and its 25 plus legal entities had to manage all of their financial operations in a multicurrency environment, transforming individual financial statements from a group of entities into a single financial statement.
challenges
Their legacy solution which consisted of putting consolidated statements together using spreadsheets had severe limitations.
- Disparate spreadsheets were not a scalable solution to implement across multiple lines of business;
- Manual consolidations processes were complex, error prone and left no time for analysis; and
- Currency translation with exception rates for items like intercompany receivables and common stock became a maintenance dilemma.
scope
Efficiency, user-friendliness and self sufficiency were the three main objectives of this project.
- Deliver a Cognos TM1 based solution to streamline the monthly financial consolidation process;
- Provide a user-friendly user interface for analysis, ,reporting and dissection of data in an interactive manner; and
- Establish self sufficiency so that the customer’s business users can easily support and upgrade the solution independent of its IT group.
solution
PREDICTif was engaged to provide an end-to-end solution and after evaluating several potential software vendors, IBM Cognos TM1 was selected for a number of reasons most notably, the ability to provide a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing, and editing enormous volumes of multidimensional data.
Cubes having dimensions ranging from 3 to 10 were created. GAAP entries, Eliminations and Adjusting entries were made through the TM1 Consolidations product. Reports created both in TM1 and Excel were readily accessible through the web with no additional effort.
- TM1 is an in-memory OLAP server, which means that can typically respond to queries more quickly than its competing products;
- By implementing TM1, the customer was able to compress the consolidations process into a matter of hours, giving analysts much more time for data analysis; and
- The customer found out that it could eliminate numerous steps from the process itself further contributing towards more time on analytic activity rather than the mechanics of generating month-end reports.
PREDICTif provided a training curriculum that was tailored to the customer’s needs and culture. Power users received comprehensive technology and solution specific training and as a result, quickly became proficient enough to instruct other end users.
results
PREDICTif delivered significant value to the customer’s return on investment related to the software and IT infrastructure investment. The solution received positive feedback from the customer’s user population and significantly improved the financial consolidation and reporting process.
- The deployment of the TM1 Consolidations and Reporting solution reduced the number of hours spent generating the consolidated financial reports and freed up considerable more time for analysis;
- The network traffic due to large volumes of attachment in the email has decreased;
- Financial analysts can generate reports and dissect large volumes of data using an interface they are familiar with; and
- The customer’s finance group uses, supports and enhances the solution without dependence on the IT support.
