ECM Industries closes its books five days faster using Oracle Cloud EPM

Based in New Berlin, Wisconsin, ECM Industries is a global manufacturer and supplier of electrical products. As a private equity-owned company, it’s heavily engaged in mergers and acquisitions as a strategy for supplementing its organic growth initiatives and expanding its range of custom electrical products and solutions. Over time it achieved significant growth with multiple divisions, brands, product lines, and sales channels. However, the company had no consistent way to financially consolidate its decentralized operating units using disparate general ledgers and ERP systems.

The company was running an on-premises version of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, relying heavily on manual consolidations and manual preparation of cash flow statements. Data was stored in multiple enterprise resource planning systems with no connection between them.

In 2020, when onboarding a new acquisition—electrical connector manufacturer ILSCO—the company decided to introduce a cloud-based enterprise performance management system that would give financial visibility across the entire organization.

After consulting the Financial Planning and Analysis Gartner Magic Quadrant, the ECM team issued a request for proposal to leading vendors of financial consolidation and planning software.

ECM reviewed proposals from companies that were able to provide consolidation software along with financial reporting tools. After a rigorous evaluation, ECM concluded that only Oracle Cloud EPM had multiple modules that would fit its requirements, whereas other vendors offered non-connected, standalone software products.

“Oracle Cloud EPM was clean and consistent, providing what we needed most: Consolidation and Close, Account Reconciliation and Task Manager to keep the team focused. No other solutions we looked at were able to do that using one common platform,” says Brad Kosler, vice president of finance at ECM Industries.

After implementing Oracle Cloud EPM, ECM gained unified reporting, visibility, and control over multiple acquired divisions with disparate ERP systems and general ledger structures. ECM could swiftly absorb acquisitions from a financial perspective, integrating the new company’s chart of accounts and general ledger structure into common financial reporting and corporate governance.

Using Oracle Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close, ECM closed its books five days faster than previously. The product also bridged a diverse portfolio of business systems, working across vendor barriers to automatically consolidate and report on data from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Sage FAS, and Basware.

In addition, Oracle Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation seamlessly integrated with Oracle Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close and brought the organization full reconciliation of balance sheet accounts each month with enhanced accuracy.

Oracle Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation also gave financial managers visibility into what teams were doing across the many decentralized sites, ensuring adherence to controls and helping to reconcile accounts monthly in a standardized manner.

Oracle Cloud EPM Narrative Reporting generated cash flow statements within five minutes of close with a few mouse clicks, compared to 48 hours when data was pulled together and translated into US dollars manually for approximately 10 different business units. The system also combined financial statements and data with textual narrative in a single report, enabling ECM to quickly create different sets of financial statements for internal stakeholders, private equity sponsors, and external lenders, compiled directly from Oracle and non-Oracle sources.

External reporting for lenders and sponsors was available 20 business days faster than before, on the fifth of the month versus the last day, empowering ECM’s business teams to carry out analysis and other value-added activities throughout the month.

Importantly, ECM also achieved data accuracy in financial reporting, reduced manual processes through automation, managed risk regarding consolidation and close, and strengthened strategic planning.

Inoapps, an Oracle Platinum Partner, managed the migration of ECM Industry’s Hyperion system to Oracle Cloud EPM.

Tapping their knowledge of Hyperion, Inoapps specialists were able to make a smooth migration. Inoapps even used the new system for integrating the ILSCO acquisition, which happened during the IT infrastructure revamp, with minimal impact on budget and timeline.

The project ran over a four-month period, integrating closely with ECM Industries’ Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne systems as well as several other legacy applications.