Kingspan Group, a manufacturer of sustainable products for the construction industry, is deploying Infor CPM Financial Consolidation to improve the speed of delivery of financial reports, enhance controls and accuracy.
The financial consolidation process in Kingspan was largely excel based and required significant effort from Group Finance to produce accurate, timely information both from a management and regulatory perspective.
Intercompany reconciliation was largely manual as were the full intercompany eliminations, statutory to management reconciliation, joint venture elimination and standard journals and audit trail processes.
In recent years Kingspan has grown through expansion and acquisition. With the financial consolidation system having been mainly excel based, adapting to these changes quickly was becoming a challenge.
Kingspan began using Infor Corporate Performance Management software for management reporting in 2003, replacing a diverse range of reporting systems at both a group and divisional level. The main objective of the project was to implement a financial consolidation system that was extensible, increased efficiency, increased accuracy and reduced the amount of time dedicated to the process. Infor10 CPM Financial Consolidation (PM 10) ticked all of those boxes.
The new consolidation process allows users to continue using a familiar Excel interface as a window into the data using a live feed to submit and read from a central SQL Server database. Opening balances and intercompany information are automatically populated into the statutory packs as a starting point for the entities, removing the need to rekey or have multiple Excel formulas written to pull balances through.
Entities are responsible for validating and submitting their packs with the assistance of control checks and an approval process included in the application. Management data is automatically populated to allow for the statutory / management reconciliation. Entities have also been given the access to create their own journals which are then approved and submitted by group in a controlled manner.
Once all the packs have been approved and entity journals posted, the group can then run the automatic inter-company elimination process. Joint ventures are also automatically consolidated.
“Infor has allowed Kingspan to automate the consolidation of multiple entities across a wide variety of currencies, geographies and industries. The main benefits of this automation process are speed of delivery of financial reports with formal data controls enhancing accuracy, while being flexible enough to allow for easy integration of acquired entities.” says Daragh Kavanagh, group financial controller at Kingspan Group.
Kavanagh continues: “Kingspan is working with Infor partner Codec-DSS to further develop the Infor application throughout the organisation in order to improve the delivery of relevant financial reports at both a divisional and Group level.”
Infor is a business solutions software provider and offers a full range of enterprise options including:
- customer relationship management
- enterprise asset management
- enterprise resource planning
- financial management
- human capital management
- performance management
- product lifecycle management
- supplier relationship management
- supply chain management
- business specific inventory management
- transportation logistics management
- warehouse management
For more information visit www.infor.co.uk.
