• Case Studies
• 11.08.2015 12:29 pm

Finance is changing. Disruption to business models, expanding global operations, fiscal complexities, evolving regulation and new risks are all demanding more of financial leaders. Along with the rise of big data and the impact of social and digital media, new economic realities and new technologies have transformed the way CFOs work.

Take the case of Aggreko: Operating globally from over 190 service centres in more than 45 countries spread over five continents, the product and service solutions it provides range from small and straightforward to exceedingly large and complex.

As a listed company on the London Stock Exchange, Aggreko is required to produce a lot of financial information in a short time-frame. Market growth and increased international investment created the need to collect and consolidate financial data from 45 countries, manage multi-currencies, analyse foreign exchange differences and assess associated risks.

With pressures of growth, a multinational operational footprint and a diversified solution offering, Aggreko’s home grown accounting systems were beginning to creak under the strain. Reliance on spreadsheets was increasingly weighing down the finance function and its multiple reporting requirements. Data provided by different countries needed to be consolidated manually and to make matters more complex, finance teams in each country were using different processes, causing inconsistencies in the financial statements reporting process.

After polling 100 internal stakeholders as part of the company’s Financial Reporting 2020 initiative (FR2020), Aggreko settled on the need for a single system to manage the monthly close, budgeting, and statutory consolidation process. Aggreko also wanted to build shared skillsets across the global finance function and consistently achieve a timely close based on accurate information.

That would allow the finance function to raise its game in terms of management reporting, and provide more meaningful insights into the business to support planning and future growth.  The disparate collection of country-level spreadsheets it had relied on for years made it difficult to derive intelligence from the data beyond core accounting needs.

Aggreko needed to standardise its global financial processes (including monthly closure, consolidation, reporting, budgeting, financial planning, and executive dashboards). They also needed to support decentralised financial processes at worldwide level, and unify its finance operation within a single IT platform.

Aggreko selected Tagetik’s corporate performance management system and mothballed its Excel-based systems for good