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Challenge
Corporate Travel Management continues to enjoy meteoric growth in a highly competitive market place. This successful growth has occurred both organically and through a series of acquisitions and in order to facilitate future plans, CTM needed to invest in industry leading performance management solutions in order to facilitate streamlined internal and external reporting requirements.
In keeping with their approach to cost effectiveness and foundation building, CTM went to the market to select tools, implementation partners and environments to help them achieve this goal.
The solution needed to be in place quickly, be easy to use and require very little on going administration and given the leanness of the operations, CTM sought an established hosting provider capable and experienced in hosting the selected tool.
Initially, the service focus was on the establishment of advanced consolidation functionality to satisfy both statutory and management reporting needs however the platform needed to facilitate budgeting and forecasting in subsequent phases.
Given the geographically dispersed nature of the company and the fact that its operations make use of a variety of ERP systems, some of which, specifically in Asia, are based on CJKV Character sets, the solution needed to accommodate easy to use data loading and translation facilities. The system also needed to be accessed by the users 24/7.
From a business perspective, CTM require the full suite of consolidation functionality including intercompany elimination, foreign currency translation, equity accounting fully derived cash flows and production of reporting packs.
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Approach
Following a review of the software marketplace, CTM decided upon the Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) solution with Financial Data Quality Management Enterprise Edition (FDM) as the data integration tool. Once this decision was made, CTM went to market for a system implementer and sought pricing and approach from a short list of providers.
The aim of the project was to upskill CTM finance staff on the use of the solution so as to minimise ongoing consulting costs. Further, the solution needed to be in place so that consolidation of the new financial year could commence with HFM.
CTM selected Taysols to design, build and deploy the solution and to train CTM users. This was delivered under a fixed price arrangement. Taysols was also selected to host the solution due to its extensive experience with hosting performance management and business intelligence products for some of Australia's largest public companies.
Having the solution hosted by a fully certified experienced organisation that could also provide all of the design, build, training, deployment and support of the solution removed any grey areas and allowed CTM to simply get on with their business confident in the knowledge that the solution was optimised for their needs and managed by experts. This significantly increased the Return on Investment and allowed usage of the system to occur in a trouble free rapid manner.
Taysols commenced design in early March 2014 and delivered the project on time and to the original fixed price budget.