SUCCESS STORY

Finance analytics promotes effective & accountable decision-making

Kagool helped the client transform their finance analytics processes, to minimise the time to close an accounting period, and to inspire a culture of consistent, effective and accountable decision-making.

About the client



The client is a world-leading provider of sustainable productivity solutions. They produce innovative compressors, vacuum solutions and air treatment systems, construction equipment, power tools and assembly systems.


They employ 43,000 people and serve customers in more than 180 counties, resulting in a revenue totalling €11 billion in 2021.

The Challenge

The client is on a journey to reduce their month-end accounting processes to 'zero close'. A key enabler for this would be their digital transformation programme, which would drive consistent, effective and accountable decision-making backed by data.



The first step was to transform their finance analytics and reporting processes, which were running on SAP BW and HANA. The aim was to create a trustworthy data layer to serve as the single source of finance truth, and present this to users via interactive dashboards. This makes relevant data & analytics easily accessible in real time to drive key business decisions.

The client's finance and controlling processes are spread across two SAP ECC applications. Unifying this data is complex, with separate charts of accounts and different allocation processes, further compounded by the big data volumes that a global business of this scale creates - 5 billion and 120 million records in each SAP system respectively. The solution also needed to be secure, scalable and adaptable to future business growth.

Our Solution

The client partnered with Kagool to define a Microsoft Azure based digital transformation strategy, building on some of their existing capabilities with Microsoft.


Kagool started with a Proof of Value of an Azure Modern Data Platform using our product Velocity for SAP data ingestion. This demonstrated that Azure and Velocity would enable the client to deliver on their vision for data, and a decision was taken to implement this platform, starting with finance.

The resulting product is end-to-end ingestion, curation, reallocation, aggregation and presentation of the client's multi-SAP finance data into Power BI every 30 minutes. From within Power BI, the user can drill-through into several thousand transactional records at the click of a button.


Access to the data is granted at a record level using row level security, controlling which sensitive financial data is visible in the reports to the logged in user.

Outcomes

Business strategy and decisions are driven by accurate and up-to-date data. Company leaders can maximise time spent analysing data, gaining actionable insights to drive decisions, and significantly reduce the time to close an accounting period.


The solution is easily extensible to any future requirements, and is the foundation on which the business-wide data platform is built. 


For Finance, this journey will continue by adding more data and introducing Machine Learning (ML) to improve financial planning and forecasting.

Benefits

Better decisions

Actionable data insights drive the right business decisions at the right time

Efficiency

Significantly reduced time to close, resulting in more efficient business processes

Accuracy

One single view of the truth ensures data is accurate and consistent, enabling it to be used and reused across all departments

Scalable

Cost-effective solution, scalable to future growth

Adaptable

Adaptable data model for continually evolving IT landscape

Innovation

Innovation ready data platform for leveraging AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), and more

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