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César

César"BusinessObjects Finance has met our expectations perfectly. Our reporting cycles have decreased by six days and we have developed a common, homogeneous process to consolidate and report."

Olivier Régis
Group Business Controller
César Group

Challenge

Based in France, the César Group is the world leader in party supplies and accessories, maintaining a catalog of more than 5,000 items it develops, manufactures, and distributes. Over the years, the César Group has acquired numerous small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and today consists of around 10 companies. With revenue of €133 million, and 1,400 employees in 10 countries, the Group is striving to homogenize and accelerate its financial processes, while maintaining the autonomy of its branch offices.

An overabundance of processes and systems hindered the financial services department’s ability to control César Group’s overall business administration. Cesar Group’s financial reporting and consolidation process consisted of Excel and an outmoded solution it used every three months for statutory consolidation, along with a comparison run twice a year between the reporting and consolidation. Moreover, the department lacked a reporting frame, and discrepancies between reporting and consolidation forced finance teams to expend time and energy correcting and reconciling reports. Struggling with financial reporting deficiencies, César Group expected to meet the limits of its consolidation tool when making the transition to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

In 2006, César launched the CORE project (César cOnsolidation and REporting), aimed at harmonizing processes and systems in order to establish a common and efficient reporting system, internally as well as externally, and to create a consolidation tool capable of supporting the transition to IFRS. Goals included producing more accurate and reliable corporate financial information and establishing shorter reporting cycles.

Other project objectives included maintaining the autonomy of the branch offices, exploring new ways of centralizing and distributing information, and better supporting the legal obligations of its companies quoted on the stock exchange.

Approach

Previously, each SME had its own processes and systems. In early 2006, the César Group chose to implement BusinessObjects™ Finance for statutory consolidation and financial reporting. As the next generation version of the solution already used by the Group, BusinessObjects Finance ensures fast adoption by users. Moreover, it meets the César Group’s requirements for financial reporting and consolidation—in particular, by providing an IFRS pre-customization. The solution also offers a robust consolidation engine, which anchors the project, and an architecture that allows information to be entered and published via the web.

The Business Objects professional service team delivered a deep level of expertise to the project, which was of great added value to César Group. Moreover, the Business Objects international presence contributed to the project’s success.

Results

With BusinessObjects Finance Standard Edition, these and other key objectives have been achieved. Now, the accuracy of corporate financial information is guaranteed, legal obligations are met, communication is faster, and reporting cycles have been shortened. César Group reduced reporting cycles by 50%—thanks to BusinessObjects Finance. “BusinessObjects Finance has met our expectations perfectly,” says Olivier Régis, group business controller at César Group. “Our reporting cycles have decreased by six days and we have developed a common, homogeneous process to consolidate and report.”

The migration to BusinessObjects Finance went very smoothly. Users were trained in two groups— the headquarters finance team created a user guide, which helped branch offices users to quickly learn how to use the new solution. Bertrand Bouniol, director of informatics at César Group, says, “With BusinessObjects Finance, the César Group has found an efficient financial solution that is flexible and can be adapted to the specific needs of a company composed of numerous SMEs.”

Today, César Group enjoys the benefits of BusinessObjects Finance, with financial information much more accurate and reliable. The solution has also enabled improvements to the closing process and accelerated the approval process. Since the implementation, instead of taking 14 days for closing results, results are available within eight days. A sales flash is also published within two days after closing, rather than taking four days as before.

BusinessObjects Finance is now used by over 20 people from all the branch offices, and four people at headquarters. Thanks to the availability of the solution via the web, branch offices are able to self-train on the system, following simple directions. At headquarters, the solution was quickly operational and the four users rapidly autonomous. César Group appreciates the efficiency and responsive support offered by Business Objects—this quality of support is particularly important to the Group because it doesn’t have the necessary internal resources to support users.

Following a successful startup, the project continues to evolve. César Group relies on the contributions and participation of the branch offices in order to continue to refine the project. The Group plans to continue building on the capabilities of BusinessObjects Finance. Planned developments include refining tables to show the movement of cash-on-hand, creating more detailed monthly analyses, shortening the reporting cycles to one day for the branch offices, automating processes, and further integrating the solution with the accounting systems.

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