Arendals Fossekompani streamlines financial close with Oracle Cloud EPM
The Norwegian power and technology group implements Oracle Cloud EPM to simplify financial processes, boost decision-making, and reduce costs.
“Oracle Cloud EPM helps us accelerate and automate reporting while reducing administrative overhead. Most importantly, my team and our business leaders now have advanced options that enable us to make data-driven decisions, empowering us to anticipate and adapt to change.”
Business challenges
Experiencing a period of significant growth, capital investments, and mergers and acquisitions, the finance team at Arendals Fossekompani (AFK) faced increasing pressure to reduce financial processing times and provide accurate and detailed performance data to the group’s leadership.
As a listed company in Norway, the requirements for precision, scope, and frequency of external reporting for compliance are highly demanding. The group was struggling to consolidate financial data from its numerous enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which frequently involved manual processes and the use of multiple disconnected spreadsheets.
Arendals Fossekompani required a powerful new enterprise performance management (EPM) system that could automate and standardize processes across the group’s international businesses, and reduce the time and effort required for periodical financial closing.
It also was looking for a cloud platform that was flexible enough to meet the future requirements of the dynamically expanding group, while reducing administrative costs.
With Oracle Cloud EPM we managed to revolutionize the financial consolidation and close process across the group.
Why Arendals Fossekompani chose Oracle
While looking to modernize its systems and processes, particularly across financial reporting and consolidation and close, Arendals Fossekompani considered offerings from multiple vendors, and ultimately selected Oracle Cloud EPM.
A key factor was Oracle Cloud EPM’s complete and natively integrated suite of applications, which span all enterprise performance management processes including planning, reporting, data management, profitability and cost management, account reconciliation, and financial close and consolidation.
An additional factor in Oracle Cloud EPM’s favor was its future roadmap and development strategy, which the company viewed as superior to other vendors.
Oracle Cloud EPM’s automation significantly reduced administrative time and costs while ensuring data accuracy and full regulatory compliance.
Results
Today, financial reporting is much faster and more efficient across Arendals Fossekompani's multinational and diverse energy and technology businesses. This is particularly important because the company must comply with 10 government entities and convert financial transactions in multiple currencies to consolidate reporting in Norwegian Kroner.
The group dramatically simplified and accelerated its financial processes by using Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close. This greatly eased the burden on finance teams and also enabled AFK to be well-positioned for future growth and acquisitions.
By using Oracle Cloud EPM as a global, automated solution, the company has saved considerable administration time and costs, and increased data accuracy. Finance teams no longer rely on disparate spreadsheets, and eliminated errors caused by manually inputting and consolidating financial information from multiple ERP systems used throughout the group.
AFK’s finance and business executives now have an accurate view of the group’s performance anytime and anywhere. They can drill down into individual journal entries and examine financial information from various operating entities at a more granular level. With detailed insights gained through analyses and scenario testing, managers can now make more informed business decisions and rapidly enact the changes necessary to boost AFK’s dynamic growth.
The company is currently exploring Oracle Cloud EPM to reengineer further EPM processes such as planning, and anticipates making it the single solution for financial consolidation and close across all of its subsidiaries.
Partners
Arendals Fossekompani selected Oracle Partner inlumi for its specialization as a full-service provider of EPM and analytics services.
About the customer
Founded in 1896, Arendals Fossekompani ASA is a diversified power and investment group listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. It owns energy- and technology-related companies that enable the transition to a green economy.