Johannesburg, 23 Mar 2007
Super Group, a supply chain management and automotive specialist, has improved the quality of its group reporting with the R2 million implementation of Hyperion Financial Management from local Hyperion distributor Intellient.
Hyperion Financial Management is used by the company to perform annual, monthly and budget consolidations and group reporting across its 16 reporting offices in South Africa, Mauritius and Australia. Super Group has an annual turnover of R10 billion and employs more than 8 000 people.
"The implementation began late in 2005 and we were able to run our first year-end on the system in June this year," says Frikkie Knoetze, financial manager: group finance and property at Super Group.
"Having run Hyperion Enterprise since 2001, the move to Hyperion Financial Management enabled us to overcome certain challenges relating to user connectivity to a central data source. With Hyperion Enterprise, the database was replicated at all our sites, but with Hyperion Financial Management users can now connect to a single, central database. The new implementation also assisted in introducing more users to group reporting and making them more responsible for the quality of the results loaded."
Licensed for 30 FDM and 40 HFM users, Super Group uses Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) to import and map data from external sources into Hyperion Financial Management. Data is imported from 150 general ledgers in 27 formats. FDM supports the upload process with detailed audit trails.
Prior to introducing Hyperion into the company, Super Group performed its monthly and annual reporting and consolidation activities using Microsoft Excel.
HFM enabled an automated data flow from the general ledger to the annual financial statements. The source data is in eight currencies, which is translated by HFM into our reporting currency. All equity eliminations and inter-group matchings are automated. HFM caters for all consolidation methods, which include full consolidation, proportionate consolidation, equity accounting and hyper-inflation.
"For the first time since inception, the company did not have any year-end financial Microsoft Excel packs to work with," says Marc Scheepbouwer, MD of Intellient. "All disclosure information was entered directly into Hyperion Financial Management, thus improving the reliability thereof and smoothing out the reporting process. Hyperion Financial Management is a comprehensive, Web-based application that has delivered true global collection, financial consolidation, reporting and analysis capabilities to Super Group. The company's employees and branch offices now operate off the same page, with a single, unified view of key financial data."
Hyperion Financial Management runs on four blade servers at Super Group. Two front-end and two back-end servers are network load-balanced. The SQL Server database is run on an outsourced storage area network.
Plans are in place to expand the system to include the company's year-end tax process, which is currently performed using Excel.
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