Adastra Group uses FinReCo for financial reporting and controlling

The Adastra Group’s financial controlling and reporting was based on using a data warehouse combined with information obtained directly from primary systems. The main controlling tool was a BI application connected to OLAP. Management reports drew some of their data from the data warehouse (accounting information) and the rest straight from the primary systems (employee data, time sheets). The lack of standardization in the information flow (ERP-DWH-OLAP-Reporting) resulted in the need to impose additional verifications on the reported data. The whole system and its related business processes were complicated, not completely standardized. Every change in the reports, including the addition of new divisions/companies, was extremely problematic, as the system had morphed over the years to comprise many exceptions and adjustments in what appeared to be the only way to meet the management’s requirements.

The data warehouse and the links to other financial and personnel reporting systems were maintained and administered by a single specialist. Working with accounting, financial and HR data ceased to be effective or efficient. Uniform business and financial terminology, master data management, was lacking. It was necessary to consolidate the source data (including local currencies, organizational structures, the allocation of indirect costs) and streamline financial processes across the Group. Dependence on the capabilities and availability of a single specialist proved to be a major problem for system administration and development. Data were uploaded to the data warehouse for about 5 hours overnight, and intraday increments took up to 2 hours.

The Group implemented its own FinReCo solution. It is a pre-prepared data warehouse with an integrated finance data module that enables real-time financial reporting.

The project’s main goals were:

• To prevent the change in systems having a negative impact on business users.
• To increase process standardization and master data unification.
• To ensure near real-time data updates.

To meet these goals, the project team focused on the following, most important areas:

• Converting existing management reports into a visually similar style while preserving all original indicators (projected revenue reports, division income statements, project income statements including KPIs).
• Implementing broader options to compare timelines and reporting units.
• Creating a reporting portal to function as a single source of all management reports.
• Enabling access to financial data using any tool of the end user’s choice (Microsoft Reporting Services, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Pyramid Analytics).
• Managing several levels of authorization.
• Unifying terminology – i.e., setting naming conventions across all branches and companies.
• Implementing a master data management tool (using the RDM from sister company Ataccama).
• Optimizing data loads into the data warehouse to update reports in near real-time.

In addition to the project’s main goals, the team also focused on improving constituent parts that affect the financial departments’ productivity:

• Streamlining the process of closing periods and scenarios so that a given period/scenario can be repeatedly updated and closed within a few hours.
• Setting up support to edit dimensions in the data warehouse without having to change accounting transactions.
• Implementing a tool to automatically reallocate indirect costs to reported power units (full reallocation).
• Unifying reporting accounts management.