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CXO Case Study: Senior PLC

Senior wanted to make its reporting process more efficient while simplifying its monthly reporting process.

11 2021 Casestudy Seniorplc Case Study

Headquartered in Rickmansworth, England, Senior is an international manufacturing group with operations in 12 countries. It designs and manufactures high technology components and systems for the principal original equipment manufacturers in the worldwide aerospace & defence, land vehicle and power & energy markets.

The Challenge

Before CXO, Senior were using Microsoft Excel linked to its SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) software for their financial reporting. “This was a slow and inefficient process that relied on effective data management by individual users,” said Justine Honour, a Group Systems Accountant at Senior. “While we were using Excel to the best of our ability, it was difficult to manage version control, and files were being emailed rather than living in one place. As a result, if one didn’t pick up the right email, one wasn’t necessarily looking at the right report.”

“The reports weren’t user-friendly either” said Honour, whose team deals with about forty reports on a monthly basis, from twenty-six operating businesses across the globe. They also “included narrative sections which are submitted as part of the reports to the Group CFO and CEO”. Narrative was embedded in those Excel reports as BPC doesn’t deal with collecting this data. Collecting and collating this information was time consuming as we had a significant number of people collaborating on the narrative.”

Building to Success with CXO

Since implementing CXO in 2016, the finance team at Senior has found it much easier to collect and combine input from the Group’s multiple businesses to tell the story behind its numbers. “The main driving force behind selecting CXO was its narrative capabilities. These capabilities allow us to easily capture explanations for variances and to explain relevant issues beyond the numbers. Now you can just create a storyboard, print it and you’re good to go,” said Honour. “Using Excel, you’d have to collate forty spreadsheets together and then create PDFs, print the PDFs, and then email them individually. Switching to CXO has eliminated this long process. It easily saved us three days from each monthly reporting cycle.”

“Beyond this, our company needs reporting to be fast, reliable and consistent; we also liked that we could train users across different parts of our business”, with Honour noting that Senior’s implementation of CXO supports 150 business users across the organization. “This allows us to use CXO for many things. We have our monthly financial reporting, forecasting, budgets, strategy, and so on. We have several people at head office who use CXO, from the Group Finance team to members of the Executive Committee. In addition, individuals in subsidiaries and health and safety departments use it to access historical figures or environmental numbers.” CXO is also useful for Senior’s KPI reporting, Honour explained. “CXO standardized them and we were also able to create a common scorecard dashboard of KPIs that is used in every meeting. You might have different KPIs that you run, but there is one version used across the company.”

CXO is now an important part of Senior’s reporting landscape. Honour explained, “the version of BPC that we’re currently using is out of support in December 2024. Whatever consolidation system we choose to move forward with in the next couple of years, a requirement will be that it must be compatible with CXO. We couldn’t imagine running our month end reporting, and review meetings without it.”

Navigating Success

Senior PLC has seen multiple improvements as a result of implementing CXO, including:

  • Three days shaved from every monthly reporting cycle.
  • One-click narrative capabilities.
  • A single reporting definition for guaranteed consistency.
  • 150 users across the business now have access to centrally maintained reports which are easy to use.

“The time CXO saved us is definitely days, not hours, off the monthly reporting cycle.”

About Senior

Senior is an international manufacturing group with operations in 12 countries. It is listed on the main market of the London Stock Exchange (symbol SNR). Senior designs and manufactures high technology components and systems for the principal original equipment manufacturers in the worldwide aerospace & defense, land vehicle and power & energy markets. Further information on Senior plc may be found at: www.seniorplc.com

The time CXO saved us is definitely days, not hours, off the monthly reporting cycle.

Justine Honour Group Systems Accountant

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