Johannesburg, 25 Mar 2020
South Africa’s leading steel company, Arcelor Mittal SA, the largest steel manufacturer in sub-Saharan Africa, recently required optimisation to its current Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) solution, and called on Futuresense, a specialist in enterprise performance management (EPM) software.
“One of the biggest issues Arcelor Mittal SA had was the fact that the consolidation speed ran very slowly. They wanted that resolved, in addition to a number of other factors,” according to associate director, Brian Butler, who led this optimisation.
“It took the skills of the Futuresense team, hard work and determination to make the project successful,” he explains. “The application was live and so we had to contend with continuous changes, and while these changes were happening in the main application, a separate application needed to be built with the improvements to the system. This second application had to be blended into the main application without any loss of data or downtime.”
Elements of the foreign currency translation reserve (FCTR) solution were also calculating and needed to be adjusted. Futuresense provided a solution that overcame these challenges, while ensuring Arcelor Mittal gained the benefit of an optimised HFM implementation. The rule file size was reduced from 18 000 lines to 3 300.
Futuresense also provided a more holistic balance sheet account movement metadata solution that made it easier to implement future changes as well as easier to understand, and improved the consolidation speed by 75% (from 12 minutes per month to three minutes per month).
Arcelor Mittal was so pleased with the implementation that the company heaped praise on Futuresense. “It is a pleasure to have Futuresense as a partner, and the quality of the work and solution provided surpassed what we were expecting,” says Christo Ackerman. “We had challenges in optimising our HFM implementation, and Futuresense demonstrated that they have the technical knowledge to optimise and maintain the system in line with Arcelor Mittal SA requirements.”
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