Chemical giant accelerates close, reduces costs with CSC

A leading chemical company consolidates its IT infrastructure, accelerates the monthly accounting close and reduces cost with CSC's help.

Client Situation

Our client needed to consolidate their US and Puerto Rico Finance processes into a single global standard to enhance quality and drive down the cost of delivering those finance processes. An assessment of their Finance operations revealed that their performance metrics were less than best-in-class with a cost structure that was above average. Our client also suffered from inconsistent data standards and quality, resulting in significant manual intervention to correct the data. Among other things, this led to a lengthy accounting and reporting cycle which a benchmark analysis revealed to be far below best-in-class.

Approach

Our client and CSC launched a project to improve data quality and accelerate financial reporting. The project focused on three core issues:

1) Rationalize the IT infrastructure to reduce the number of systems required to support Finance,

2) Establish standards and governance around the creation of data to enhance overall data quality, and

3) Develop a new financial reporting schedule that incorporated best practices and reduced the overall cycle time to best-in-class.

Using our process reengineering methodology, CSC performed a benchmark analysis to document current performance relative to high performing companies and helped identify the priorities for transformation. Through a series of best practice workshops, CSC and our client designed a new financial reporting cycle that leveraged a rationalized IT structure and the new governance structure for data management.

Results

With CSC's help, our client rationalized over 40 separate systems, including numerous SAP instances, into one, global SAP instance. A governance process was instituted to define and maintain data quality. Finally, our client's reporting cycle was reduced to best-in-class.