Does reporting and consolidating financial data from approximately 150 different companies sound like a complex task? It does indeed. However, with a powerful Financial Management solution from Affecto, industrial investor VKR Holding manages to keep up, despite a massive amounts of data that need to be collected, analysed, reported and consolidated in compliance with constantly changing requirements imposed by legislators.

Having used Hyperion Enterprise for several years, VKR Holding turned to Affecto for a major upgrade to Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM).

More work - same resourcesVKR Holding’s mission is to own and develop companies that bring daylight, fresh air and a better environment into people’s everyday lives. The number of employees in the group totals 15,000 and the combined annual revenue in 2010 was DKK 16,8 billion.

“Our main challenge in Corporate Finance is handling changes in the group’s structure. Moreover, reporting and consolidation requirements are increasing to support the business best possible.Simply put, we need to do more work with the same resources. Hence the need for a more powerful Financial Management solution,” says Anders Qvortrup Christensen, Group Chief Accountant at VKR Holding.

Delivering on schedulePowerful is exactly one of the words that first comes to mind when trying to describe HFM. It offers a vast range of features, a user friendly and intuitive interface and is easy to maintain and develop.

“It is tempting to think of it as an “upgrade” from Hyperion Enterprise to HFM, but it really is a whole new system implementation. It certainly isn’t like upgrading your suite of MS Office products to a newer version,” Anders Qvortrup Christensen points out.

“We were fully aware that we had a big job ahead of us. We also had a strong desire to have the new system up and running, fully functional, within a rather short and fixed timeframe. Affecto’s consultants succeeded in delivering on schedule, as promised. They were able to put in the needed resources at critical times to ensure completion of the project on time.”

Easy to use

The benefits for Anders Qvortrup Christensen and his staff at Corporate Finance are numerous. Simplified reporting, clear and instant overview and overall faster performance just to name a few.

“With Oracle Hyperion Financial Management we are able to carry out far more tasks quickly and efficiently than before. Equally important is that our users are happy with the system because it is so easy to use.”

Implementing HFM inspired to simplify the core structure of the way data was organised with the previous system. Four different databases were cut down to two that actually provide one set of numbers and, thus, faster system performance.

“If I was to give one piece of advice to other companies in the process of implementing a similar new system, it would be this: Remember to take advantages of the new features and opportunities in the new system. Don’t just set it up to do things the way you have been used to. Otherwise you don’t capitalise fully on your investment in a new, improved system”.