T. Rowe Price modernizes long-range financial plans with Oracle Cloud EPM

The global asset management firm, which had been a longtime Oracle E-Business Suite customer, was looking to move all finance technology solutions to the cloud. However, the company also relied heavily on Excel for reconciliation, financial close, and consolidation processes. This prompted the company to look for a solution that would add capabilities that could efficiently solve for some of its many manual processes. The goal was to provide a single source of truth for its financial processes and help ensure data integrity.

T. Rowe Price selected Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM to complement its digital transformation. The applications provided the necessary tools to consolidate financial data, including account reconciliation and financial consolidation and close.

The company also valued the analytics and detailed reporting capabilities, features essential in increasing the ability to outpace market changes with ease.

As a user of Oracle E-Business Suite on-premises, T. Rowe Price identified Oracle Cloud as its next natural step toward cloud innovation and future business growth.

By deploying Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM, T. Rowe Price created a solid foundation for streamlining its financial processes. With a single source of truth for its financial data provided by Oracle Financials, the company used Oracle Accounting Hub to standardize accounting through an enterprise-wide chart of accounts.

Furthermore, the financial services provider created a transparent, auditable process for tracking investment trades, gain and losses, as well as market-to-market entries for the general ledger.

The organization automated the allocation of journal entries to legal entities using Oracle Cloud EPM Profitability and Cost Management, which provided more visibility and additional data tagging to support intercompany eliminations.

Using Oracle Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close, T. Rowe Price streamlined the consolidation of its investment products, eliminations, and creation of financial reports. Today, the finance teams spend less time compiling data and more time analyzing data and delivering monthly management reporting.

Using Oracle Cloud EPM Account Reconciliation, the firm automated account reconciliations to increase transparency into the status of the close process and reduce risks, which were previously associated with the manual reconciliation process.

The company also streamlined its tax provisioning process by directly accessing its financial data from the general ledgers or financial consolidation system through Oracle Cloud EPM Tax Reporting.

In addition, T. Rowe Price improved the data management process, using Oracle Enterprise Data Management. Fueled by a single source of trusted information, the company used the embedded collaboration capabilities to effectively manage all changes to enterprise data. As a result, the asset management group decreased the risk of human errors and manual controls required in the process.

To deploy Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM, T. Rowe Price collaborated with Oracle Partner Grant Thornton. The project kicked off in early 2020 under a phased approach and took one year to implement. The projects were completed on time and on budget.

“Grant Thornton was a great partner for us. What makes T. Rowe Price unique is our culture, and it is really in alignment with Grant Thornton’s culture. We were able to work very collaboratively together as a single team,” says Lindsay Kutzer.