“In only ten weeks we were able to deploy our new consolidation solution – and immediately use it for our annual close.”
Johann Adler, Team Leader of Group Consolidation, Planning and Reporting

KraussMaffei’s fiscal year ends on September 30th. So when its project team decided to implement a new consolidation solution, it only had one summer to finish the project. Thanks to Tagetik 3.0 and the support of Alper & Schetter, a partner of pmOne AG, however, the team was able to implement a new concept, transfer the legacy data and even train users within just a few weeks. The company experienced a smooth transition to the new system and no holdups in the financial closing. The users are pleased to have a professional, auditproof consolidation system that is easy to use and delivers significantly higher data quality.

The Challenge

Back in the summer of 2008, the team responsible for group consolidation within KraussMaffei’s finance controlling department faced the challenge of implementing a new consolidation solution in an extremely short time frame. Under the direction of Johann Adler, the team was determined to build a system that reflected the new reporting structures that resulted after a massive group restructuring the previous year. The urgency of this project also had practical reasons. The system that the company previously used to generate its financial statements was discontinued by the manufacturer.

The project stakeholders took the time to examine several different tools. The solutions offered by large, well-known vendors seemed too cumbersome while those from smaller vendors either lacked key functions or couldn’t offer long-term investment security after recent acquisitions. “We were looking for a speedboat – not an oil tanker,” Adler recalled.

In addition to creating financial statements (balance sheets and P&L statements), the team wanted the flexibility to quickly update changing conditions or structures within the system. The solution should also support simple simulations such as analyzing the potential effects of buying or selling a company. Finally, the system had to fit into the existing IT architecture,
which included SAP systems and an established, recently upgraded OLAP analysis tool for management reporting. A professional consolidation system was the missing link between these systems – and it needed to be implemented very quickly because the timing was extremely tight.

The team chose Tagetik 3.0 because the software easily fulfilled each of these requirements. This solution offers built-in functionality ranging from modeling and mapping workflows to collecting and distributing data for planning and consolidation. The team finalized their decision to implement Tagetik 3.0 in late May 2008.

Objectives

After the IT requirements were clarified with the support of pmOne, the joint project team kicked off the project. The ‘go live’ date was set for September 30th, the end of corporate fiscal year, so that the team could use the new system for the upcoming financial close. Since each person was given clear responsibilities and assignments, everyone knew what had to be done. The consolidation experts at pmOne’s partner Alper & Schetter spent the following weeks on site. Their job was to design a concept and then parameterize and implement the software.

The employees at KraussMaffei also played an active role in the project. In addition to writing input/output reports, the team also created structure data and processed the legacy data so that it could be transferred into the new system. Prior to doing so, Alper & Schetter and pmOne trained the users in the new software and were coached on how to build reports.

An IT consultant from Isys, which has advised KraussMaffei in technology issues for many years, rounded out the project team. Her role focused on importing the data from Tagetik into the OLAP cube.

After just ten weeks, the new solution was ready. From June until mid August, the project team was able to implement the concept, parameterize the system, transfer the existing data and even conduct user trainings at the corporate headquarters. That left the entire month of September for fine tuning and training users in the subsidiaries. The project team at KraussMaffei prepared and ran these trainings themselves. Staff members within Germany were offered one-day trainings in Munich while their international colleagues participated in four-hour online training sessions.

By the end of the month, the system went live. The project team immediately started the financial close without even doing a prior a test run. Without any technical glitches, the solution generated the financial reports and passed the audit with flying colors. “Thanks to the high level of standardization of Tagetik 3.0 and the professional support of Alper & Schetter and pmOne, we were able to reach our project objectives. In only ten weeks we were able to implement – and immediately use – our new consolidation solution,” explained Johann Adler.

Benefits

Approximately 50 employees worldwide – only six of whom are based in corporate headquarters – work with the Tagetik solution. The remaining users are divided up among 30 companies. In addition to Germany, the solution connects users from France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Slovakia, USA, Mexico and China. Instead of sending their data in an Excel file to corporate headquarters where they were manually imported, they now use a Citrix Web connection as a medium for local data entry. Since Tagetik 3.0 is completely Web-based, no software needs to be installed – or maintained – locally. The subsidiaries do the intercompany matching themselves through the Web. Thanks to built-in plausibility checks and account settlements, they could significantly improve the quality of their month-end closings.

In the past, the group used separate systems and structures for its monthly and year-end closings.
Since all closings are now aligned within Tagetik 3.0, even monthly financial statements can be audited. That also means that KraussMaffei can skip every twelfth (consolidated) monthly close on account of the annual close. In addition, the numbers in financial and management reports are identical because they are created using the same data.

“This project is a major step forward for us. We now have a professional consolidation system with periodic account settlements. We could immediately see the advantages of working with the system. In particular, the handling is so much easier for our users and the data quality is much higher,” concluded Adler. Due to the positive experiences with Tagetik 3.0, the project director is already thinking ahead towards the next steps. The team, for example, currently imports the SAP data manually. The next logical step would be to automatically transfer data from the source systems to accelerate the entire consolidation process. In the more distant future, the company also intends to deploy Tagetik 3.0 for enterprise planning in order to unify its CPM processes in a single solution.

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