Enabling multicurrency financial consolidation across 33 entities

00:00:15Laerdal has dedicated the last 60 years to helping save lives and we have big ambitions to make a huge impact on society. So, our goal is to save 500,000 more lives every year.

00:00:30Two years ago, we decided to go for Board. One of the key criteria was that it should be best in class and it should be cloud.

00:00:37We had four projects that we wanted implement. We had Board Financial Consolidation, which was to deliver financial statements to the board and to the authorities. We had Managerial Reporting, which was to deliver financial reporting to our internals, as in managers and keeping KPIs. We have Project Budgeting and Reporting, which was to provide the project managers, such as myself, with finance on our project on how we're doing. And we also had a Project Sales, Marketing, and Service Forecast, which was, for them, to be able to put in their sales forecast and to provide information for our supply chain to be able to deliver on those forecasts.

00:01:23Laerdal was looking for a new financial consolidation, reporting and forecasting tool. The goal for the project was to automize as much of the processes as possible, so that the users can spend their time in analyzing and understanding the data that is presented. We also wanted to bring in more information, more dimension to make analysis better.

00:01:46What is important to see here is that we have the reconciliation database and that means that all the data is reconciled here, so that we are absolutely sure that the BFC, the statutory, and managerial reporting is aligned. When we validate every month, we validate 33 legal entities in Board. Then we look at the BFC and managerial.

00:02:15So in BFC, we followed the built-in process that's already there. We consolidate 96 reporting units, 16 nodes, 19 currencies, 285 cost centers, and 229 product groups. So then, we take a look at the project budgeting and sales marketing. The project budgeting and reporting is a step-by-step process that's been built. Here, the users follow the different processes that they are told to do, and they end up with a budget summary. And again, with the forecast figures, you see that we follow a given step-by-step process, which ends up in the forecast summary.

00:03:00Then we have the sales, marketing, and service forecasts. Here again, same idea. Follow a step-by-step process to enter in data and, as you see here, we have simultaneous data entry from 33 countries. Scenario, simulation, multi currency data entry, audit ability and validation workflow.

00:03:24So now we're in much better shape. We have the financial figures to support our business. We have the KPIs presented to management. The project managers can use the systems to drill down and see where are my costs coming from. They can go so far that they can actually pick up the invoice itself and bring it up. So it's a huge improvement.

00:03:42But, we would have never, ever changed our master data unless we had seen the transparency that Board gave us to start.