Sappi, the global producer of coated fine paper and forest products, has completed the roll-out of the Hyperion Enterprise financial consolidation, reporting and analysis solution to more than 150 users around the world.
Executives at Sappi use the product, distributed in SA by Global Technology Business Intelligence (GBI), to consolidate financial information from more than 330 000 accounts across 429 entities scattered around the globe.
Laurence Newman, group financial controller at Sappi, says the group has a complex set of financial reporting and consolidation needs, including the consolidation of financial information in euros and US dollars.
"We selected Hyperion as it is one of the few products fit for the job. It eases the collection, consolidation, and reporting of financial results in a global business by managing multiple currencies and regional financial reporting," says Newman.
Newman cites improved accuracy and consistency of financial information and time savings as the major benefits enjoyed from the implementation of Hyperion Enterprise.
Sappi, which employs more than 19 000 people, has operations throughout Europe, the Far East, the Americas and Southern Africa. The group is listed on the Johannesburg, New York, Frankfurt and London stock exchanges.
Sappi uses a range of operational systems across its business units and regional subsidiaries, including SAP R/3, the enterprise resource planning package used by most Sappi divisions; Microsoft Excel, which is used in the smaller operations; and some legacy systems. Hyperion Enterprise extracts and consolidates information from these systems and presents it in a standard format through a uniform reporting tool.
Sappi runs four worldwide versions of the Hyperion application, which users access across its wide-area network. The group has begun developing the product`s Web-based reporting functionality to give mobile users and executives access to Hyperion information across the Internet/intranet.
Wouter van den Heever, group systems accountant at Sappi, says the product has dramatically reduced the time the organisation needs to spend on financial consolidations and helped it to enhance financial analysis and planning.
Van den Heever says: "Hyperion Enterprise ensures that Sappi executives, from middle through to senior management, have access to the same up-to-date financial information. End-users have found it to be intuitive to use and have reported that it saves them a great deal of time."
Graham Chapman, Sappi account manager at GBI, says Sappi has taken full ownership of the Hyperion system after a two-year implementation cycle. He adds: "One of the strong features of the Hyperion suite is that it can be deployed and configured with relative ease by a financial department, with limited involvement from consultants or the IT department. Sappi not only handles administration and maintenance of the product internally, but has also trained most of the users of the product itself with training materials prepared by the financial department."
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