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Leading Multinational Credit Insurer Creates Single Source of Truth with CXO Software

Atradius shaved one day off their financial reporting cycle by standardizing their reporting and reducing manual work and inconsistent results. 

 

Atradius, the credit insurance arm of Grupo Catalana Occidente, provides trade credit insurance, surety and collections services to more than fifty countries worldwide. The company, which has existed for nearly a century, moved several group functions to Madrid, Spain in 2016 from its head office in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The Challenge

Before using CXO Software with their Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) consolidation system, their reports were manual. “HFM allows us to do a lot of hierarchical drilling, it allows us to do a lot of segmentation by products, business units, countries, and everything is quite tidy,” said Amir Abusuud, Reporting and Analysis manager within Group Control at Atradius, based in Madrid. “You can easily generate the points of view you need, but at the same time, every report was a spreadsheet that needed to be refreshed manually.”

“You had to count on no errors occurring in the preparation of a large chain of reports, many of which were linked to each other,” said Abusuud. Additionally, there were often different versions of the truth to contend with. “Historically, without standardized reports, you could find yourself interacting with a business unit where you might say ‘we see revenue is down by 0.5%,’ and then someone else will open their report and say ‘that’s not what I have,’ because they had constructed their report in a different manner,” said Abusuud.

Abusuud said the sheer number of pages and reports that they needed to extract just to compose their management report pack consumed valuable time in the reporting cycle that could have been better dedicated to analytical tasks. “The primary report we use at a group level for our management board and our shareholders has fifty-seven pages, and almost all of them needed to be produced from HFM manually,” said Abusuud. Other users within the group had to go through a similar, tedious process to produce financial management information for their own purposes. Abusuud said, “we spent a lot of time producing the reports, and were left with less time for reviewing and analyzing them.”

Building to Success with CXO

CXO was recommended to Abusuud by a former Oracle account manager. “Atradius decided to give it a try,” said Abusuud. The company has now been using CXO for more than ten years. Abusuud said it instantly provided users who weren’t familiar with HFM, and don’t have specific expertise, the ability to easily understand and navigate the dimensions of their complex chart of accounts. “It gave people a way to access core financial management information on demand. As these reports were pre-constructed, the end-users now have a menu listing all the key reports that they could access at any time. So, CXO ensures that everyone is working off one single version of the truth.”

“That was the first advantage. Interestingly enough, the advantages just kept coming and we found many more ways to keep leveraging the functionality of CXO,” said Abusuud. One of the next big benefits was an increase in efficiency that sped up the production of key management information after each month end closing cycle. There were substantial efficiency gains from the use of narrative templates to gather analytical commentary during close that Abusuud’s team previously had to chase individually by posing questions over email and waiting for responses. With the help of CXO, it is now possible to automatically collect all comments from subsidiaries or business units that explain deviations from one place and, as Abusuud said, “export all the questions and comments with one click.”

These time savings mean that more time can be dedicated to analysis. “CXO has taken a day off of our reporting cycle,” said Abusuud. “I can create a summarized version of the key findings from the figures from the narrative templates and I can trust that those comments are referencing the same reports I’m sending in my deck because they’re standardized.” Abusuud said, “the ultimate goal of controllers is to dedicate less time to production and more time to analysis.” For Abusuud, “CXO has been a great enabler for that.”

Navigating Success

Atradius has seen a number of improvements as a result of implementing CXO, including:

  • “Everything is consistent.” Building trust in information with a single source of truth that is shared across all countries and business units.
  • “A time-saver.” Shaved one day off their financial reporting cycle.
  • Analytical commentary “at the click of a button.” Spend less time sending questions and awaiting answers from subsidiaries or business units, leaving more time to analyze the commentary and uncover new insights.

“We are producing the management deck better than ever, and one day earlier.”

Amir Abusuud Reporting and Analysis Manager, Group Control

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