Futuresense helps modernise automotive financial management system

Issued by Futuresense
Johannesburg, May 11, 2017

African Automotive Aftermarket Solutions (AAAS), a market leader in the replacement automotive parts industry, has partnered with Futuresense to modernise its financial management systems.

The Imperial Holdings-owned entity, Midas Group, changed its name to Africa Automotive Aftermarket Solutions (AAAS) in July 2015. By implementing Oracle's Hyperion Financial Management, a financial consolidation and reporting application, the company has automated its manual systems and enabled flexible, accurate and rapid reporting.

"Businesses today face a vast range of complex financial reporting requirements. While transaction systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems typically have general ledger modules that summarise results at period-end, on their own they are not adequate to support the extended financial close process. Financial consolidation and reporting applications, such as Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, add significant value by enabling reporting, and integrate easily with any ERP system," explains Riaan Mellet, Director at Futuresense.

"In light of AAAS's needs, we implemented Oracle Hyperion Financial Management. This allows the company to rapidly consolidate and report financial results, meet the regulatory and reporting requirements, and easily conduct in-depth analysis of key performance and operational metrics," says Warren Bull, Corporate Financial Manager at AAAS.

He explains the company has been growing through a series of acquisitions, and the existing - and mostly manual - system was becoming strained. The ERP system managed the day-to-day accounting, but could not do the financial consolidation and reporting. As a result, AAAS elected to modernise the system with Futuresense, a consulting company specialising in Oracle's EPM Hyperion Suite of products, providing the solution.

"With almost 100 branches in our business, we needed something to allow us to combine all of the data in a meaningful way, quicker than numerous spreadsheets. Hyperion Financial Management has not only made the process of loading data and consolidating it a lot simpler, it allows us analyse it a lot faster," he says.

"By enabling the data to be extracted quickly and easily, we are able to drill down and investigate to understand exactly what is going on in the business. In fact, we now use it in our budgeting process and we see the potential for more uses now that it is set up."

AAAS markets and distributes quality automotive and leisure products and services, and includes warehouse distribution, co-operative buying, retail, commercial parts, franchise and agency, and investment businesses. "Having a consolidated way of looking and drilling down into the many businesses has made our operations more efficient, and has opened up new opportunities," adds Bull.

Mellet points out the Oracle Hyperion Financial Management offers many benefits, including reducing consolidation, close, and reporting cycles. "In addition, inter-company balances are matched and eliminated, foreign currency is properly calculated, cash flow statements are automatically produced, and minority interests are properly accounted for. With Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, AAAS is able to gain in-depth operational insights easily by combining financial and non-financial results for greater insight into performance metrics. The finance team can analyse consolidated information across unlimited user-defined dimensions, including company, product, brand and customer."

Bull says the software keeps proving its value, and the service the company has received from Futuresense has been phenomenal. "The Futuresense team has been great at assisting with queries and explaining details around Hyperion. As a result of the great support and response times we have received from them, we even nominated them for our Service Supplier of the Year award in 2016. With our new ability to gain a single view of our financial and operational results integrated from multiple systems, without delays, we expect to leverage Hyperion to achieve further growth, and are looking forward to working with Futuresense towards that future."