Client Background
An export trading company, managing supply chains for major brands and retailers worldwide, with an extensive global presence and cover over 14,000 employees, the Group operates a sourcing network of over 80 offices covering over 40 economies across North America, Europe and Asia.

In addition to the wide range and variety of consumer products available through its sourcing network, the group also leverages its strengths in custom product design and development to provide complete global sourcing solutions for its customers.

Business Challenge
Client requires a system to consolidate data from various data sources and do timely reports to reflect the operation performance of each division. Sales figures need to be broke down and analyzed by various parameters such as by region, by division, by product line, by client type..etc. Also, costs of operation need to extracted and classified according to group accounting policy and allocated to appropriate cost centers. All this work was done manually and human errors are inevitable and timely data was never available.

The group is a large enterprise with many different divisions operating worldwide, in addition, many of those divisions are acquired though merges and acquisition from other companies, the computer systems used among them are various from infrastructure to application level. Data formats are even worse problem to solve. There are altogether 1800+ profit/cost centers', operating in 80 countries. These highly diversified data sources not only create problem for data consolidated, but also the interpretation of them.

Another challenge the system need to handle more than 30+ currency, conversion of monetary data becomes so complicated in related to exchange rates and time of conversion. Some also involve locking of exchange rates in letter of credits.

The system are aimed to produce meaningful KPIs and reports, so to facilitate the financial planning, reconciliation of actual figures with budget, and forecast for the up coming financial situation. Business strategy and planning can be formulated by using the results.

Solutions
After months of comprehensive requirement study, and almost a year's development effort, a Management Accounting System (MAT) was deployed. The system was capable to consolidate data from all the data sources and formulate the data warehouse ready for reporting within 2.5 hours. In order to facilitate the data import and capture, there were 500 input templates developed using MS Excel and special data loader programs were developed to handle particular data sources. A common XML data schema was defined and all data were stored in MS SQL Server.

From the data warehouse, KPIs are generated and various reports are produced. Management are now provided with timely data that shown the current situation of the business with a forecast to the future trend. Multiple financial cycles were also supported for monthly, quarterly, and yearly budgeting and reporting. The costs were allocated to appropriate cost centers by the user defined rules automatically and creation of user defined accounts were provided for regroup of ledger accounts if required.

The system highly automates the Management Accounting process and created tremendous values for the customer in understanding, planning and forecasting of the worldwide business performance.