Global Insights: Building Operational Efficiency

Background

The CFO office of the global Automotive Supplier (the Client) was facing elongated book close and consolidation cycle time of ~ 4 work weeks and sub-optimal use of their finance teams due to the manual nature of collating data and generating financial information. Due to a string of acquisitions and mergers, the client had around 150 legal entities supported by a wide spread of ERP systems of different makes, variations in accounting policies & procedures and non-standard business processes. This complexity also required a significantly high count (around 1300 finance professionals) to support finance operations.

The desired eventual outcome from the CFO office was to reduce the book close cycle time to ~1 week, improve human resource productivity by at least 20% and improve reliability of financial information.

Pain Point

Given the heterogenous nature of the operating environment and high number of source systems, there were significant variation in the accounting data structure. Lack of automation solutions for data extraction and harmonization also shifted reliance on spreadsheet and desktop automation solutions as the available alternative. A combination of the above resulted in inconsistency in data interpretation and increased accounting re-work thereby increasing financial accuracy risk and non-productive use of finance professionals. The ask was complicated due to lack of structured MDM governance constraining globalized view of performance and comparability within the organization.

The client wanted to accelerate delivery of accurate and timely financial reports and insights without disrupting their existing source systems. They wanted to ensure operational stability prior to initiating a global strategic solution for consolidating their source systems and establishing a COE for reporting and analytics.

Key Objectives

1. Reduction in book close & consolidation cycle time to by 30%.
2. Operational efficiency in finance function by 20%.
3. Centralized global finance data warehouse.
4. No disruption to existing source systems.
5. Standardized Local and Global view of Financial reporting.
6. Accelerated development and rollout of core solution.
7. Solution Scalable and Replicable to group entities in Iterative fashion.
8. Full data traceability and auditability.
9. Well-organized, consistently written, and modularized code for shorter learning curve.
10. Compliant with global security standards.

Solution

Universal Finance Ledger(UFL) as Single Source of Truth (SSOT). Calibo’s team of practitioners evaluated the existing business processes and accounting sources of truth and in collaboration with the client, co-created a state-of-the-art Universal Finance Ledger implemented as a Single Source of Truth of financial records.

The fully integrated self-service development platform offered by Lazsa’s low code Data Intelligence Studio (DIS) was chosen for developing the solution. With out of the box pipeline orchestrators and integration with powerful tool stacks such as Databricks (transform), Snowflake (Data warehouse) and AWS cloud (S3 as Data lake), the team was able to leverage the platform’s capabilities which enabled to turn the disparate data from multiple source systems to actionable insights. PowerBI was chosen for building the visualization and reporting - guided by advanced data platform architecture principles, and InfoSec prescriptions to deliver the required performance. Atlimetrik utilized its technology and domain accelerators including its standard UFL model for financial reporting and financial reporting pipeline components on top of the low code infrastructure to accelerate the delivery cycle time.

Solution incorporated custom built lightweight Master Data Management solution to build golden record for the master entities combing through data ingested from multiple source systems across the geographies. The resultant UFL was SSOT for client where client could fetch standardized, harmonized, accurate and consistent data for consumption. Exception or Failures in processes were captured and flagged to the user for remediation. The system keeps track of unprocessed records and provides appropriate insight into the reason for failure.

A novel approach was adopted for generic UFL model based on a convergence of desired insights needs and source data availability. The approach also yielded a persona based, context driven suite of standard financial reports at different levels of aggregation and slices, along with working capital insights focussing on Accounts Receivables(AR) and Accounts Payable(AP).

Outcome

The Solution delivered a unified data platform with near touchless consolidation of all financial transaction data from a variety of source systems that are aligned to a Universal Finance Ledger Data model. The transaction data was further enriched with harmonized master data references to ensure a global view of financial insights and intra group comparability. The Finance team accrued significant resource efficiency through automation of data management and reports preparation.

The out of the box connectors and templatized approach of ingestion and transformation functionalities ensured a shortened learning curve, build time and hence faster time to market. The SSOT is robust and scalable and can evolve for addressing enterprise business reporting needs.

Calibo helped the client achieve:

50%

Reduction in book close cycle time

30%

Improvement in Resource Productivity

80%

Automation in consolidation of Financial Transactions across enterprise

100%

Data traceability and auditability