Challenge:
California office of large Japanese ceramics and electronics manufacturing company identified an opportunity to improve the efficiency of its financial reporting process. Preparing board package typically took days of work each month, including a substantial time just to compile the data. Everything was manual, from downloading balance from SAP, reformatting it in Excel, reviewing the transactions, making adjustment and then running that process all over again until the reports were right. There was a need to automate those manual steps, eliminate the need for extensive data verification and reconciliation, and enable authorized users to generate reports directly from their desktop. The project scope included the delivery of more than two dozen automated income statement and balance sheet reports to streamline the financial reporting process.
Approach:
Apolis uses an innovative approach to ensure that deliverables are robust, flexible, adaptable and have completeness of vision. We did thorough evaluation of customer’s existing reports, mapping, allocations, capital expenditures, and to-be requirements and then implemented an agile data store & reporting architecture using SAP BW, BusinessObjects and HANA that effectively handled a combination of SAP and non-SAP data. Financial Hierarchy is created with optimized drill-down capability by each of customer’s many lines of business. We then developed Business Objects Reports that connect to data views to provide data to users in a pixel perfect templates as desired.
Results:
Apolis solution has improved the reliability, relevancy, accuracy and timeliness of customer’s financial board package. It is saving several days of effort that customer now uses for analysis instead of data checks and formatting. All reports run directly from SAP, and are available as soon as a reporting period is closed in the ERP. Financial statements are easily exportable to Microsoft Excel including line item details. The new automated process is so user-friendly that additional users can review the reports, which in turn enables customer to identify and adjust incorrect transactions more efficiently.
