BISSELL gains better financial planning and reporting with Oracle Cloud EPM

BISSELL has been a family-owned business since it was founded in 1876. Throughout that time, the company has created innovative products to help people keep their homes, businesses, and communities clean. With a breadth of products ranging from vacuums and carpet cleaners to pet hair removal products, BISSELL has a solution to clean up life’s messes big and small.

Despite well over a century of success, the company faced a problem when it came to planning and managing performance of the business. The crux of that challenge came down to version control managing different datasets. Multiple teams were working with different spreadsheets, leading to inefficiencies and hours of wasted time spent on repetitive tasks. Reconciliation was also an issue, particularly when it came to calculating compensation planning, quarterly budgets, and annual plans. On the human side, employees were frustrated with duplicate efforts and trying to find the source of truth in the vast amounts of data.

This impacted not just BISSELL’s short-term plans but long-term growth as well. Having multiple versions of the same dataset was complex but trying to manage that data across global teams made it difficult to map out growth plans. The company knew it needed to make a change and modernize its systems and processes to gain more visibility into the business, and streamline planning for success.

BISSELL had been a long-time Oracle customer. It used Oracle E-Business Suite and Hyperion Planning and Reporting for the last 10 years. The positive experience that the company had with past Oracle implementations and the Oracle team drove its decision to select Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

Throughout the demos and presentations Oracle gave, it became clear that Oracle Cloud EPM was very mature, with polished functionalities. BISSELL found that Cloud EPM expanded on the best features from its past E-Business Suite and Oracle Hyperion environment and offered additional capabilities that would help the company plan more strategically.

BISSELL also appreciated the ability to quickly turn on modules such as Workforce Planning. The decision to move to the cloud was about improving the workforce planning process, gaining better insights into profitability and cost allocations, and establishing a single source of truth for financial planning and analysis data. The flexibility to recalculate compensation, perform what-if analyses, and account for attrition and retention across teams was a huge benefit that the company did not have before.

After implementing Oracle Cloud EPM, BISSELL’s planning and reporting process improved significantly. The company used Cloud EPM as a central repository for all its management reporting data and found the look and feel of the forms very user friendly. This helped streamline the change management process so that employees quickly received training on a new system without much resistance. By making this transition easier, teams were able to get up to speed with the new application and take advantage of its capabilities to uncover benefits.

Time-savings was a key improvement  for BISSELL. Managing allocations in the past environment required hours every day, which delayed reporting to upper management. Global teams were also delayed depending on the geographic region. By moving its actuals allocations for customer and product profitability data into the Profitability and Cost Management tool within Oracle Cloud EPM, BISSELL cut this processing time from over 4 hours down to 15 minutes. The entire process from data exports to final reports was also cut from nearly 12 hours to about 3. This provided more visibility into the business with closer to real-time data reflected in management reports.

With the automation and task scheduling functionality of Oracle Cloud EPM, the company has also greatly reduced manual effort. Employees were working long and sometimes extended hours when they had to step in and perform a necessary task. The cloud now gives users time back in their day to focus on more strategic work.

BISSELL also saw gains in automation and efficiency in long-term planning objectives. Each global team can now build its own plan and control it without excessive manual work. With capabilities like trend-based calculations and driver-based forms, a team could build a full plan within 30 minutes if necessary. This is significantly faster than the spreadsheet system. All the planning and reporting across the organization is now synchronized in Oracle Cloud without the risk of broken connections or data loss. Oracle Cloud EPM also gives the company the flexibility to tweak plans as needed and adapt to changes in the market.

By consolidating data and empowering employees to do more with it, the company can understand its business better and plan for future growth and success. As the company moves additional modules over to Oracle Cloud, staff is keen to build on the past 146 years of BISSELL’s innovation.