SEEK recruits Oracle Cloud EPM for speedy financial reporting
“Oracle was the clear winner in terms of capability and smashed it out of the park in terms of value.”
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Founded in 1997 in Melbourne, Australia, SEEK is a portfolio of diverse companies that focuses on recruitment, education, and volunteering. Operating in 18 countries, it has relationships with more than 215 million job candidates and 1.1 million employers and has been growing at about 20% a year.
To continue its robust growth—especially against data-savvy competitors such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn—SEEK needs deep insights into the economic landscape in each of the countries in which it operates. That landscape includes available jobs, in-demand skills, regulatory environment, makeup of the local talent pool, and more. But its reporting capabilities weren’t keeping up.
Even after a three-year transformation program called Cloud 9, SEEK’s Head of Finance Excellence, Peter Lim, concluded that the company’s data and reporting capabilities still were subpar. “We built this really great car with a powerful engine, but we couldn’t use the car to get to where we wanted, so what we ended up doing was getting out of the car and walking to our destination,” Lim says.
Three to four months from start to finish to deploy a full working reporting tool has been an amazing experience.
Why SEEK Chose Oracle
SEEK was impressed that it was easy to try Oracle EPM before buying. Security and legal approval took only about three days. SEEK was then able to build its reporting cube in less than a week. Network integration took only one day, for single sign-on and connecting to data sources. That was followed by report generation, and then most of a month working with finance teams on trying the tool and communicating results.
Risultati
Oracle Cloud EPM significantly reduced the time it takes SEEK to generate financial reports—for example, from days to minutes to generate reports. P&L functions that required weeks to build in a data warehouse are now built in less than a week.
The company’s domestic finance team produces five monthly packs of reports, which previously required half a full-time employee to prepare. Now it can automatically produce the same material in a minute, Lim says.
Reconciling those monthly packs required about four FTEs, at a cost of about AU$560,000—effort that can be reinvested after transitioning to Oracle Cloud EPM. SEEK aims to save the time of another half an FTE by automating monthly board reporting.
By automating low-value tasks such as reconciliation, process management, and corrections, SEEK’s finance team now spend more time on improving the quality and reliability of reporting data.
Meanwhile, SEEK can easily deliver reports customized for different business areas such as finance, product technology, and human resources.
“We can become a better business partner,” Lim says. “We recommend better ways of working today to help prevent some of the challenges we may face tomorrow.”