Enabling a fast cloud migration for finance with Oracle FCCS

The client is a global designer, manufacturer and distributor of flooring products. Originally founded in 1895 in the UK, the Group now has operations in the UK, Europe and Australia, employing approximately 2,600 people across more than 20 sites. The Group develops, manufactures and distributes a wide range of carpets, ceramic and porcelain tiles, underlay, LVT (luxury vinyl tile), artificial grass and flooring accessories, aimed at the middle-to-upper segment of the market. It is the largest manufacturer of carpet in the UK and the second largest in Australia, as well as the largest manufacturer of underlay in both countries.

Our client’s consolidation and statutory reporting process was managed using spreadsheets and manual entries. The rapid growth of the company meant that this had become too cumbersome and no longer fit for purpose.

The challenge

Rapid growth in business had significantly increased the scale and complexity of group reporting, which included accounting, multicurrency and IFRS requirements. Growth through acquisition had also resulted in minimal IT integration and the subsidiaries were operating their own underlying systems. These ranged from standalone accounts packages to fully fledged ERP systems.

Group reporting, in terms of both monthly management accounts and half and full year statutory reporting, was being done using spreadsheets. These were completed by the subsidiaries, submitted to the Group and then consolidated further in spreadsheets.

Some of the subsidiaries also completed sub consolidations for their own local ‘sub group’ which was then added into the higher level consolidation at Group. When Oracle’s Financial Close and Consolidation Cloud was selected as the best-fit solution for our client, it was expected that the Group will have visibility of these sub consolidations which will assist the audit trail from local statutory accounts.

The solution

Oracle’s Financial Close and Consolidation Cloud was selected as the best-fit solution for our client. The primary objective of the project was to replace spreadsheet-based processes and provide a more robust, controlled solution for half and full year group consolidation and statutory IFRS reporting. 

It was felt that our client would benefit from the flexibility and speed of an agile design approach combined with the governance provided by our structured implementation framework.

Concentric’s implementation framework contains standardised project stages, detailed project tasks and dependencies and default work estimates based on previous EPM projects and refined by information captured during the pre-sales cycle. 

The project plan is then taken as the baseline for the implementation and reviewed and revised where necessary at the end of each stage.

Key benefits

• Improved audit efficiency
• Ability to easily complete all statutory disclosures
• Consolidated and statutory cashflows produced as required.

The results

The solution improved audit efficiency by giving a clear audit trail from the local numbers up to the consolidated accounts.

As well as the primary financial statements (Income statement, Balance sheet, cash flow and SOCI) sufficient data is now collected through this process to enable Group to complete all required statutory disclosures. The solution produces the Group consolidated cash flow and subsidiary cashflows as required.

The solution produces the Group consolidated cash flow and subsidiary cashflows as required.

“We engaged with Concentric to help us implement a new cloud-based consolidation and reporting platform, FCCS, which was first released by Oracle in 2017. Furthermore, we set the task of having this fully implemented in a very short period of time and with limited company resource. Despite these challenges the project was successfully completed within our timeframe. We are delighted with the Concentric team, who demonstrated a very high level of technical expertise, commitment and flexibility to help us achieve our objectives.” – Financial Controller

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