Oracle Customer Success—Tower Ventures LLC

Tower Ventures Pays 750 Vendors in Minutes Instead of Hours, Closes Financial Books in Days, Not Weeks, and Accelerates Business Cycle

Bringing in advanced technology, such as Oracle Financials Cloud, will not only make us more profitable, it will accelerate the business cycle. We can create asset portfolios faster, and we have the data that carriers require at our fingertips. We are a much stronger organization with Oracle Financials Cloud.

— Michael McLaughlin, CFO, Tower Ventures LLC

Tower Ventures LLC is a leading owner-operator of communications towers. Its services include construction, management, leasing, and marketing of communications tower sites and rooftop locations throughout the United States. The company’s portfolio encompasses more than 600 cell towers, 206 land parcels, and seven commercial real-estate holdings spanning 41 states.

Tower Ventures delivers sites quickly, and is well-known for constructing sites in areas with significant challenges. Its expertise includes dealing with construction obstacles, such as zoning issues, local policies, and ordinances. The company has worked with many of the nation’s largest communications providers, including Sprint, C Spire, Verizon Wireless, Cricket, AT&T, Clearwire, and T-Mobile.

Business Challenge

Reduce the administrative burden of manual, financial-data input as the company, which has more than 30 subsidiaries, continues to grow
Improve insight into the financial performance of the company, which has a complex chart of accounts and numerous associated business entities

Ensure that the group’s financial and customer information is secure, a priority when dealing with leading communications services providers
Enable the management team to spend more time analyzing information and focusing on communications tower deals, as opposed to data input and review
Meet rigorous invoicing and purchase-order requirements associated with serving large communications carriers
Improve ability to track and manage fixed assets, which include hundreds of communications towers
Accelerate and streamline customer invoicing and payments to more than 750 vendors

Deployed Oracle Financials Cloud and created a robust and highly scalable environment that enables the company to close books in days instead of weeks and gain real-time insight into its financial performance
Automated core financial processes, eliminating time-consuming and expensive duplicate manual data entry and reducing the time spent configuring reports and reviewing data for accuracy

Expanded the reporting capability to provide greater insight into financial performance
Automated depreciation of cell-tower assets and enabled the group to close fixed-asset books in minutes instead of two days, saving significant accounting-staff time
Accelerated and eliminated errors associated with manually entering data for 600 major assets into financial system—improving accuracy, allowing more time for analysis, and ensuring more-informed business decisions
Benefitted from an enterprise-class financial solution without the cost, complexity, or upfront infrastructure investment of an on-premises solution
Gained the ability to pay more than 450 rent checks through automated clearing house capabilities in five minutes instead of five hours—freeing accounts payable staff to focus on other projects
Used Oracle Hyperion Smart View to gain visibility into workflow and data entries in real time, allowing early detection of errors, as opposed to waiting days to identify them in a trial balance
Gained the ability to make rapid month-over-month comparisons and drill down to segment, account, and even transaction levels for better trending intelligence
Enabled the CFO to spend more time on analyzing deals and moving the business forward by freeing him from spending the vast majority of the day on accounting oversight
Automated bank-account reconciliation for the company’s more than 30 subsidiaries, eliminating the need for manual, line-by-line, bank-statement reconciliation
Ensured that the company can confidently meet the very specific requirements of large enterprise carriers related to purchase order requests and receiving revenue
Improved customer relationships and financial precision with ability to invoice rapidly and allocated bulk payments from large customers to individual assets
Improved ability to respond to executive and stakeholder requests for financial updates
Gained anywhere, anytime access to vital financial information while ensuring security
Eliminated the need to hire additional accounting staff as the business and its assets grows
Automated payments to 750 vendors and eliminated the time and expenses associated with issuing paper checks and mailing them, including administrative, postage, and supply costs
Avoided the need for a large upfront technology investment and enabled the company to quickly take advantage of technology advances
Improved ability to make more profitable business deals and accelerate business cycles

Why They Chose Oracle

Oracle’s continued investment in its financial cloud was also important to Tower Ventures. “Our previous accounting software was not keeping up with the times. We know that Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud is going to grow with us as a company as we move forward,” McLaughlin said. “Obviously, Oracle provides us the best solution for the size of our company.”

Security was a third priority. “If Oracle cannot secure your data, who can? We benefit from the billions of dollars Oracle spends to ensure secure solutions—an investment that we could never match in house,” McLaughlin said.

We selected Oracle Financials Cloud for the fact that it can do pretty much anything. Our legacy financial reporting tools were not providing management with what they wanted or needed. We now have real-time data and can pull any financial statement at any time and see exactly where we are, empowering us to make better decisions for our company.

— Michael McLaughlin, CFO, Tower Ventures LLC