Fischer Homes improves profit margins with strong foundation on Oracle Cloud EPM

With 30,000 homes built, Fischer Homes was recognized by Builder Magazine as the 29th largest homebuilder in the United States.

Fischer Homes had been using Excel spreadsheets to perform critical financial projections and was struggling with manual and lengthy reconciliations of projection data caused by on-premises enterprise applications. The company wanted to eliminate the risk of accidental data loss or changes and help ensure data integrity.

Meanwhile, fragmented financial planning processes caused difficulties with short-term and long-term planning. The lack of input from regional divisions also hindered the company’s financial planning and forecasting activities. To streamline the process, Fischer Homes required a solution that would combine real-time data and built-in collaboration capabilities to improve forecasting.

The company also sought dashboards and accurate reports with drill-down capabilities to increase its financial forecasting projection periods. This would enable the homebuilder to proactively address changes in the market and maximize profit margins.

Fischer Homes selected Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) over other vendors because of its superior features and ability to simplify the company’s time-consuming manual processes and support its growth.

The organization also valued Oracle Cloud EPM’s ability to streamline planning and forecasting processes and easily integrate with on-premises business applications to help achieve data integrity.

After deploying Oracle Cloud EPM, Fischer Homes established a foundation for standardizing and streamlining previously fragmented business processes, particularly in financial planning and forecasting. Using Oracle Cloud EPM Integration Agent, the company extracted data and metadata from on-premises sources and loaded the information into Oracle Cloud EPM, helping to deliver end-to-end data integrity and security.

The company also improved data reconciliation using embedded collaboration capabilities to effectively manage all changes to enterprise data. As a result, Fischer Homes eliminated the risk of human errors that were frequent while using spreadsheets. In addition, the homebuilder tapped Oracle Cloud EPM dashboards with advanced charting and visualization capabilities to gain real-time views of its financial position. The Oracle Cloud EPM Narrative Reporting module is being used to increase the visibility of financial information across the business. By combining inputs from regional divisions, Fischer Homes is establishing the baseline for more accurate financial planning and forecasting.

With Oracle Cloud EPM Planning, Fischer Homes gained the ability to model scenarios that align short-term and long-term forecasts with the organization’s overall growth strategy. Combining historical data provided by its enterprise resource planning and operational applications with inputs from regional divisions, the company forecasted 24-month projection periods with daily updates. As a result, Fischer Homes could quickly react to market changes and maximize profit margins.

Oracle Cloud EPM’s user-friendly interface facilitated its adoption across the enterprise. The company’s workforce benefited from secure access to data—anywhere, anytime, from any device. 

Fischer Homes worked with Grant Thornton, an Oracle Platinum Partner, to implement Oracle Cloud EPM. The project went live in 2021, on time and on budget.