Analytic Vision

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Company Background

Volvo Financial Services (VFS) was formed in 2001 when Volvo joined several of its existing business units. The primary focus of VFS is to provide a full range of financial services to customers and dealers of the Volvo Group.  Headquartered in Montvale, New Jersey (USA), VFS is active throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. VFS's team of about 1,250 professionals manages approximately SEK 100 billion of assets, located in about 60 countries.   VFS is a leader in creating financing solutions for new and used trucks, buses, construction equipment, marine engines and aircraft equipment.  You should expect the very best…and it is Volvo Financial Services’ mission to deliver on that expectation.

Business Challenges

• Needed to Upgrade to Oracle’s EPM 11 platform and replace legacy environment
• Current Infrastructure did not support future growth and the IT controls required for separate development, User Acceptance Testing, and Production environments including hardware failover, load balancing, and disaster recovery
• Current Essbase applications for Finance, SAP, Stats and Dealer performance were outdated and required manual support
• Overall budget process needed to move from excel based models and assumptions to Oracle’s EPM platform
• Workforce Expense Planning was not integrated with the Financial Statements
• Capital Expense Planning was not integrated with the Planning process
• Revenue Planning and expense planning needed to be integrated with model
• Ability to easily perform what if Analysis was very time consuming and manual
• Establishment of effective and efficient financial management processes for continued company growth
• Current Planning system relayed on manual spreadsheets to perform majority of calculations and the overall budget timeline and tasks were very inefficient and were not integrated
• Very limited flexibility for key business user to alter assumptions and make adjustments and see the impact immediately

Solution Implemented

PHASE I, II, II, IV and V:

• Designed and developed EPM roadmap for new version 11 platform and upgraded existing Hyperion legacy platform to 11 including Essbase, Planning, and Scorecard processes.   Designed, architected and Installed development, UAT and production infrastructure environments including enablement of Active Directory and Life Cycle Management to move applications across environments
• Implemented  and automated Latin America’s SAP BCS data load to new consolidated Americans Solution (replaces SAP & Finance databases) and implemented new reporting process for Latin America regions
• Consolidated Finance & SAP, STATS and Dealer, Essbase databases to single solution, automated Pyramid load & calculations, reconfigure Account, Legal Unit & Product group hierarchies, implemented enhanced security configuration and new business rules for FP&A team.  Designed and developed solution to capture write-off data, capture inter-company eliminations, changed account values from year-to-date to periodic, conducted Web reports training and implemented additional formulas for analysis across time periods.  Eliminated standard Excel reports for America’s.  Completed currency conversion for local, USD & SEK
• Design and implement planning applications including Capital expense, Revenue,   Cost Center Expense, and P&L.  Solution included all revenue and expenses in base, USD and SEK currency and included Upgrading to Workforce Planning and breaking out salaries into a separate plan type.   Load salaries from HR by employee and cost center and automate business rules for merit increases, bonuses & allocate increases throughout the model at global/individual/departmental levels
• Automate and integrate G/L process for Americas with the SAP Data Warehouse and automate the data feeds from data warehouse the EPM 11 platform
• Automate and integrate STATS load process for Latin America with the SAP Data Warehouse and automate the data loads from Headquarters and automate Headquarters template file upload process to SAP BCS

Business Benefits

• Infrastructure design and capacity to support global deployment and test environments.   Reduced total cost of ownership and implemented Single sign on
• Consolidation and process improvements provided more efficient reporting of data
• Efficiency gain of 5 hrs per month in loading the databases and one time load of Latin America data with consolidation of Finance/SAP databases.   New EPM 11 platform aligns with SAP BCS to create a common structure.  Provides write-off and operating income results and enabled Finance to generate & maintain reports; eliminates dependency on IT
• Enables regional currency consolidated reporting in US dollars and SEK and greatly improved data integrity. Reduction of 3 weeks of manual work for consolidation of calculations for US and Canada.  Standardization of planning models for US and Canada and Elimination of large complex Excel spreadsheets
• Fully automated process for G/L data loads, cross-functional reporting capabilities, more effective forecasting capabilities and close process reduced from 1 month to ½ month for Latin America (man hours)