To manage the group’s growing number of company accounts, SPH set out to find a solution that would enable it to simplify its financial consolidation and reporting processes.

Hua Cheng Hong, VP Corporate & Financial Applications at SPH explains: “When we ran our request for proposal, we were specifically looking for an out-of-the-box solution which required minimum customization. It was also important that the financial consolidation tool we chose to deploy could easily integrate with our existing budgeting and financial reporting systems.”

SPH went to tender to find a financial consolidation tool that would help its finance team manage the group’s consolidation activities. One of the shortlisted solutions was IBM Cognos Controller, proposed by IBM Business Partner Adept Enterprise Solutions.

Having used IBM Planning Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics to support its budgeting and forecasting activities for some time, the financial team at SPH felt that the solution would be easy to implement and launched a proof of concept to assess the solution.

“IBM Cognos Controller satisfied most of our core requirements,” says Koh Mui Leng. “We evaluated the solution based on proof-of-concept prototypes using real business scenarios. We saw that the solution would help us streamline the consolidation and reporting process. For instance, the easy-to-use web interface of IBM Cognos would allow our remote subsidiaries to load and validate their own data, without having to send it to our subgroup accountants to do it for them.”

Hua Cheng Hong explains: “We assessed Adept Enterprise Solutions and selected them as the System Integrator (SI) because they demonstrated extensive experience implementing IBM Analytics solutions for companies with a similar structure to ours. The expert consultants from Adept added real value to the implementation, helping us to improve many of our processes, such as standardizing our foreign currency exchange mechanism, improving the intercompany reconciliation process and redesigning data entry forms so that they are more user friendly.”

During the implementation, Adept conducted rigorous user acceptance testing with employees at SPH to ensure that they felt comfortable using all the features of IBM Cognos Controller. To optimize the financial consolidation process, Adept Enterprises also automated data integration from SPH’s budgeting and forecasting tool into IBM Cognos Controller—allowing the same consolidation processes to be applied to both forecast and budget data, which in turn facilitated more effective comparisons between different versions of financial reports across SPH’s companies.

Andrew Ng, Managing Partner at Adept Enterprises, adds: “I am proud of what we achieved with SPH using IBM Cognos Controller. We managed to alleviate our client’s consolidation pain points and optimized many of their processes, from company data submission through to final report generation.”