The client is a multi-billion-dollar collection of hundreds of discreet businesses, which often are organized into practice areas. In one practice area there are four distinct operating companies.
Historically each of these organizations has operated its own P&L and ERP system to capture individual business unit financial data. What has been lacking is a single system of record to automatically consolidate the required financial data to understand and report on the entire entity or execute financial data reconciliation with the general ledger.
Because of this, much of the month and quarter end reporting was still happening manually. Different teams were extracting data and readjusting codes in the ERP system for consistency by hand. Team members reported that it took most of the month to complete all this work, while still keeping core financial operations up and running.
The practice area lead organization was looking to eliminate costs and time associated with calibrating this data so they could manage these business units from a one P&L vantage point, while also freeing up team member time and resources to focus on more value-added tasks.
Pivot X was engaged to support reconciliation and variance analysis for things like actual vs AOP/budget, actual vs forecast and YoY actuals comparisons across the entities as a first step in a journey to fully automating the consolidation of financial reporting across the four business units. Access to the relevant files of each entity was provided, along with a master Hyperion file, which contained all the aggregated data across various teams, departments, and account code hierarchies.
Also, the variance analysis is actual vs AOP/budget, actual vs forecast and YoY actuals comparison. This exercise is done during the financial close period after the financial consolidation.
PivotX leveraged its unique I2I (Idea to Implementation) prototype driven methodology to rapidly prototype an automated solution. The solution leveraged real world data to drive a better understanding of the needs and data issues, providing end users a way to address their immediate pain areas and quickly become advocates for extending the roadmap for a larger solution set.
PivotX first worked to transform and consolidate the data, which enabled the automatic aggregation comparison between the unit details and the aggregated Hyperion file. This allowed teams to confidently compare their month-to-month forecasts for gap analysis and reconciliation. This effort is also informing the bi-annual operation planning cycle, allowing teams to compare monthly performance against stated forecasts.
The key to the project was to first fully understand the business requirements before engaging with the data, applying a change management mindset that aligns stakeholder needs with expected outcomes. In less than two weeks the PivotX team was able to normalize the data, implement transformation rules, and execute the engineering needed to stand up the solution.
The rapid pace and project agility was enabled in part by the team’s Data and AI Programming Framework, where full-stack data/AI engineers deploy strategic use of GenAI and LLMs to cocreate and execute transformations.
Once the initial data transformation and automation work was complete, the PivotX team leveraged the files from various systems such as Oracle and Hyperion. This data was landed into Google Cloud Platform in BigQuery, from which the reconciliation processes are being automated.
With the initial data foundation in place, the organization is looking to PivotX to help enable data governance, data observability and a data catalog alongside the infrastructure, with the configuration taking place through Google Catalog in combination with Pentaho.
The solution, built out and delivered in less than two months, drove significant cross-team involvement and has become the foundation for the lead practice organization’s finance data product with its own future roadmap. For example, the team has discussed with PivotX the potential of creating a business user interface where finance team members easily adjust new codes and entities every month. And while Finance is the first functional area to benefit from this application, due to early cross function stakeholder involvement additional corporate functions such as Audit are eager to participate in plans for onboarding their areas in rapid succession.
