Commander FDC has enabled the gold mining giant, formed from the merger of the gold interests of Gencor and those of Gold Fields of South Africa, to quickly adopt a uniform reporting standard. It is also enabling the new company to create a corporate financial database of considerable value in the management of the new combined operation.
"Although FDC had only been installed for a short time, we found it extremely valuable at our year end in June, " says Saartjie Heyns, management accountant at Gold Fields Ltd.
"I had seen the benefits of using FDC before the merger, when we implemented it at Gencor`s head office, following its successful use in Billiton in Holland," says Heyns. "When Gold Fields was launched, one of my first proposals was that we install FDC, and I insisted that we do so before our first year end, in spite of the shortage of time."
Heyns` persistence paid off, and the new company`s first year end was very successfully completed, despite the decision to use FDC being made only one month beforehand. The year end involved completing eight consolidations, and back-dating them for comparison purposes.
"It was a very hard time in my life, and even SPL, which supports the product in Southern Africa, warned me that it was not a good idea!" laughs Heyns. "However, I had experience with the product. I knew exactly what I wanted and it worked very well. We completed our year end within three weeks.
"Since then, I have trained my assistant and my manager in FDC, and was able to take leave over the quarter end in the knowledge that it would be handled efficiently in my absence," she says. "That is exactly why we bought the product. Monthly, quarterly and year ends should all be managed in exactly the same way, and FDC does this for us."
Commander FDC, from Comshare, has now been installed for four months, and has been rolled out to all the company`s mines. The actuals have been completed, and Gold Fields is in the process of doing budgeting and forecasting using the new system.
"We`re still busy with the basics, and intend to do a lot of development work with the product," says Heyns.
"Comshare FDC is ideal for a company like Gold Fields Ltd as it is a financial consolidation application that collects actual, budget, and forecast data from remote subsidiaries," says Gavin Steinberg of SPL. "FDC delivers financial data and reports to the desktops of analysts, manager, and executives for ad hoc comparison reporting. For statutory reporting, FDC consolidates actuals from multiple general ledgers and multiple charts of accounts to produce consolidated results quickly.
"For management reporting, FDC allows users to view the data from many different perspectives - legal, geographic, operational, by product or product line, for example, providing management perspective that goes far beyond statutory requirements," he says.
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