UK's designer store liberty improves productivity by over 80 percent

Headquartered at its famous Regent Street store, London, and renowned for its designer clothing, fabrics and furnishings, Liberty improved productivity by over 80 percent through implementing a financial software solution.

Consolidation at Liberty now takes just four days instead of three weeks with Comshare FDC, a sophisticated financial consolidation and management reporting software solution. "With one database and the same rules, we have one version of the truth," says Brian Muirhead, Liberty's finance director.

Muirhead was appointed last year to spearhead Liberty's restructuring process and strengthen the financial position of the company.

Throughout last year, Liberty underwent an intense period of restructuring to modernise its business processes and meet rapid changes in market demands. One vital area that had to be addressed was consolidation and financial management reporting.

Muirhead was familiar with Comshare FDC from his role at Whichford, a leading motor dealership group, and turned to FDC to improve efficiencies after comparing it to other solutions. Comshare FDC has significant technical advantages over the competition, such as a nominal ledger download facility, which was crucial for Liberty's business, says Muirhead.

Comparing Comshare FDC to Liberty's legacy system, Ray Mehta, senior management accountant at Liberty, says: "With FDC, I do not have to spend any time retyping figures and can respond to queries in literally minutes, which was unheard of using the spreadsheet system. Structural changes are easy - departments and all their history can be easily moved," he says.

"In the former system moving and reclassifying departments, for example moving children's wear from fabric to another division, was time consuming and arduous. Now all I need to do is point and click, pick up and transfer the directorate location," says Mehta.

Muirhead is impressed with the security options available on FDC. "Passwords are available for FDC users and we can lock data to ensure that no one can edit or overwrite information. This results in fewer errors and more accurate reporting," he says.

"Prior to FDC, we made manual comparisons, using spreadsheets between the monthly reports, profit and loss statement and budget figures," Mehta says. "Now, we can load budget data into FDC and make comparisons at the press of a button. We can report actuals against budget at nominal ledger detail, and build up a picture of what we've achieved, what we forecasted, and what happened last year."

Gavin Steinberg, Comshare business unit manager at Dimension Data i-Commerce Software, says: "Comshare FDC is ideal for a company like Liberty as it is a financial consolidation application that collects actual, budget, and forecast data from remote subsidiaries, such as Liberty's Japan based subsidiary."

"There are innumerable opportunities for South African businesses to improve their efficiencies with Comshare FDC, as Liberty has done," concludes Steinberg.