Medline automatizza e centralizza il proprio processo di consolidamento

Trascrizione

10 years ago, if you were to look at our company we had only 3 entities, in the last 4 years we've added 40 entities and right now we're at 70 entities.

So, we have grown in complexity, we've also grown globally and that's required us to focus on a bit more of the consolidations aspect that are more complicated including foreign currency, intercompany eliminations.

We had two people, two full-time headcount dedicated for … you know … 7 billion dollar company and we were also 100% in Excel, which means it was at a very general level, sales, cost goods sold, SGNA.

So, our main challenges for managing the consolidation process at Medline, are our multiple ERP systems, our subsidiaries operate on various ERP systems and they also don't fully operate on US GAAP, so, we have to maintain those US GAAP entries at the local level, so, our goal in the last four years has been to centralize the consolidations process so that we can dictate the US GAAP activity at the subsidiary level internationally.

We did not have that ability before we used CCH Tagetik.

It was once a year… was when we were doing our consolidation so the shareholders and the executive office only saw consolidated results once a year, 4 months after the year ended, so it was not used and we didn't have any forecasting about where we are going to end the year.

About 4 years ago, with our acquisition growth, we decided that we needed an automated solution, so we went out into the marketplace and looked at the various options and we saw that CCH Tagetik was in the high quadrant for flexibility as well as consulting and we compared it to SAP as well as Host Analytics, we saw that CCH Tagetik appeared to be much more flexible, not only with configuration but also with licensing, SAP restricted our licensing and that was going to be a primary factor because we wanted to roll this out internationally.

What set CCH Tagetik apart from other vendors was its flexibility and its ability to expand and scale with our growth.

The primary benefit of using CCH Tagetik is its automation, the upload process and the transformation process is easy to maintain and easy to execute, very little time uploading and transforming.

Then, it also automates the exchange rates and intercompany eliminations, so that we can actually focus on analytics and audit.

Reducing the time to actually run consolidations gives us the benefit of having more time for audit and analytics.

Now we have the opportunity to consolidate on a monthly basis and therefore forecast out the year, so we have estimates before … you know, quarter 3 and so we're in a pretty good place with our forecasting.

One of the benefits that we had seen with the automation was we actually reduced our publishing time by a whole month, which is significant for us.

So, the biggest positive impact it's had on our team for consolidations is probably three-fold: one is it reduces our risk, we had poor people process and implementation technology before we had CCH Tagetik.

Second, we really decreased the time and use of our auditors, it decreased our cost for auditors as well as increased our consolidations expertise within the company.

Understanding what we were going to end the year at helps us forecast our distributions and also helps us forecast what we're planning on doing shareholder related and selling shares, as well as increasing equity, assets and cash flow.

Those are the benefits that the CFO receives right now.

Yes, I would recommend CCH Tagetik to other companies, I think its flexibility fits with a complex business and it's also user-friendly.

So it's very straightforward and easy to maintain.