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With plans for further development in a highly competitive telecommunications market, Netia SA decided to launch a project to increase customer retention. Netia has chosen STATISTICA Data Miner, which provides the most modern techniques to analyze data and produce predictive models to support customer maintenance activities. Due to increased competition in the telecommunications industry, it is becoming ever more important to care for current customers. Netia aims to adapt each offer to clients’ current needs and ensure satisfaction with services. The goal is to be more effective through the union with StatSoft.

Mr. József Sinkó, quality assurance & regulatory manager at Pepsi Hungary, highlighted the need for an effective SPC system to ensure strict quality requirements in production processes. The previous SPC system was cumbersome and time-consuming, lacking the necessary tools for efficient data analysis over extended periods or multiple parameters. Pepsi Hungary required a system that could monitor and control product quality parameters, recognize trends, and identify error sources. Additionally, the company aimed to monitor machine capability, eliminate waste, and reduce the plant's carbon footprint.

FLIR Systems needed a way to analyze massive amounts of data within its Explosive Threat Detection business to improve product quality, reduce downtime, and accelerate R&D. The company faced challenges in monitoring incoming parts from suppliers, as any slight variation could have huge consequences. Additionally, the manual analysis of streaming data from multiple systems was time-consuming and inefficient, often taking hours to interpret and translate into usable information.

With an SAP HANA ERP system being used to handle transaction processing, Kennametal had been using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), FDM, and Hyperion Planning for 15 years, but the products had been receiving little investment from Oracle and were no longer meeting the company’s requirements. The administrators of the Hyperion applications were so consumed by maintaining the products they had little time for value-added work. As they began looking for alternative solutions, it became clear the Kennametal team needed an intuitive solution that could be easily learned and navigated by users with limited support from the administrators. The team evaluated several alternatives and selected OneStream as a unified solution for financial consolidation, reporting and planning.

The innovative company wants to improve its financial information delivery. “We used Excel® for our financial consolidation. This was very manual driven, subject to errors and overly time-consuming. For a faster, more accurate and comprehensive view of the entire enterprise, you need a consolidation system,” says Harm Polman, Sr. Director Financial Planning & Analysis at Ampleon, about the reason to implement OneStream. After several demos, many positive reference calls, and a visit to OneStream’s Splash user conference – the team was convinced that OneStream’s unified CPM platform and MarketPlace solutions could meet their current and future needs. An ROI analysis projecting a lower cost of ownership for OneStream vs. the Hyperion suite also firmed up their decision to make the leap to OneStream. Preparing for Expected IPO One of the motivations for the optimization is the possible IPO of Ampleon. “We want to be able to consolidate more efficiently and reliably, especially given the possible IPO,” says Polman. In the context of investor relations, you need to have your reporting process in order. “We want to be able to provide our internal stakeholders with information faster and ensure it is reliable information, which will mainly constitute trust,” says Robin Whelan, Reporting Manager at Ampleon. “Once listed, we will face more and tighter deadlines and external information requirements. Then we must be able to produce ad hoc analysis faster.” Another reason is to reduce dependency. Polman says: “If one person does everything manually, and that person becomes ill or leaves the company, then you are very vulnerable. With standard processes and an off-the-shelf solution, creating backup becomes much easier.”

Growth mindset and expansion goals led Crane Worldwide Logistics to a path of over 45 instances of Sage 300, a disparate chart of accounts and an overburdened InsightSoftware reporting solution. Excel®-based consolidations and compiling budget sheets was not only time-consuming but also induced questions into data accuracy and integrity. In addition, translating data from 28+ currencies and reconciling intercompany balances was arduous. “We had a lot of limitations with Insight, because it is not a true consolidation system,” said Michelle Ford, Finance Director, Crane Worldwide Logistics. “Sage was auto-feeding data into Insight, but it was a very time-consuming process to give us a consolidated view. And using Excel® spreadsheets for every legal entity was subject to error. Loading trial balances was a very tedious process, and we had no capabilities for currency translations, so anything that was not USD was challenging to process.”

As a staffing business, robust people and salary planning is critical to CHG’s success. Conducting their monthly rolling forecast and people planning was a critical, but manually intensive process. And while this was manageable as a smaller organization, using Excel® spreadsheets and legacy budgeting tools to manage CHG’s high growth became increasingly challenging. To complete the monthly forecast, the CHG Finance team would first export a payroll file from their JD Edwards Payroll system and then use the Oracle Smart View for Excel® add-in to extract budget data from their Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) application. From this, they would create over 150 individual Excel® spreadsheet templates and distribute them via email to the business owners for them to complete. Once those spreadsheets were complete, the Finance administrators would then use Smart View to load them into HFM to compile the results and send reports back to the business owners. With fragmented and manual processes, CHG required several iterations to correct errors. Spreadsheets had to be revised, and multiple emails were required to communicate issues and transfer new files. Adding to the complexity of this process was the need to closely manage sensitive payroll information to ensure it was only visible to the correct individuals. The process had become untenable.

BDO had been using several Oracle Hyperion applications since 2009 to support their planning, reporting, and analysis processes. Over time, their deployment had grown to include three Hyperion Planning applications and nine Essbase reporting cubes spanning ledger data, contracts, employees, projects, demand, and workforce reporting. This complex landscape of applications led to multiple versions of the truth, manual data movement, system stability and availability issues as the data volumes grew, and ongoing maintenance challenges. It was time for a change.

From 2008 to 2018, IFAW's treasury team operated with the same technology infrastructure despite a substantial increase in global complexity and expansion. The team used a TMS, spreadsheets, bank portals, and a locally hosted ERP. The global disparity in payment standards, settlement systems, and compliance requirements across regions made collections, disbursements, and liquidity needs complex. The shared services model required various degrees of access and control over financial data and operations. Manual workarounds for non-critical accounts were time-consuming, and some relied on mailed statements. The decision was made to overhaul the treasury technology architecture due to these constraints and the upcoming move to a cloud-based ERP.

As a rapidly growing company with a global presence, TeamViewer’s treasury department faced significant challenges by 2019. The 2-person team had to manage 10 legal entities, 7 banks, and 39 individual bank accounts across 11 countries. While 15 accounts were managed through a centralized solution, the remaining 24 required access via various electronic banking systems and portals. This plurality of systems led to time-consuming, manual, and potentially error-prone workflows. A significant portion of the treasury’s daily bandwidth was spent on handling different e-banking solutions, ensuring secure and compliant workflows, and maintaining visibility across global cash balances and payment statuses. Sabine Kießling, Director Controlling & Treasury at TeamViewer, recognized that unifying all existing banking and back-office solutions through a single system would reduce workload, increase efficiency, ensure compliance, reduce fraud risk, and provide full visibility and control over global payments and cash positions. This would allow the department to focus on strategic tasks and support company growth more cohesively.

Archroma faced significant challenges in managing its payment transactions due to the complexity of connecting various banks via their individual eBanking tools. This led to security issues and heavy time demands on the Treasury Department and back office operations, as payment rejection information did not feed back into SAP automatically. The company aimed to reduce costs by minimizing the number of bank platforms, establish straight-through processing out of SAP, and adhere to compliance regulations through the automation of bank transactions via a single platform.

In 2018, the treasury team at GCPAT wanted to drive a reliable cashflow forecast with complete transparency for all numbers reported. The organization had outgrown Excel, and with the number of banking relationships growing past the 50 banks mark it was becoming impossible to feel comfortable relying on balances that were manually pulled from various e-banking portals. After being introduced to Cashforce, a software application specialized in the forecasting space, the next challenge was to ensure that the balance and transactional information fed to Cashforce could be automated, reliable, and completely transparent. The treasury team understood that without quality in data, the outcome of liquidity planning would be less optimal. So, they took an action to seek a connectivity solution to meet the goals.

CORESTATE faced a complex and heterogeneous IT and treasury landscape, lacking a unified platform to integrate third-party service providers and property managers for payments and reporting. This resulted in a lack of centralized information, process transparency, and cash visibility. The company had grown significantly, both organically and non-organically, leading to a tenfold increase in assets under management. The treasury tasks were previously handled by the Controlling and Accounting department, which was not sufficient for the growing needs. CORESTATE needed to restructure its treasury operations to make them future-proof, standardize processes, and improve cash management and liquidity planning.

DACHSER faced significant challenges in managing communication between its foreign subsidiaries and banks, leading to resource overhead and serious compliance and security concerns. The company aimed to achieve SEPA compliance and harmonize payment processes out of its ERP system, while reducing the complexity of formats, decentralized accounts, and local signatory rights.

BearingPoint faced several challenges with its decentralized financial operations. The company had over 120 different bank accounts across more than thirty banks, making it difficult for the central treasury to consolidate financial data and track employee payment authorizations. The manual processes were time-consuming and error-prone, and there were concerns about compliance, particularly with the four-eye principle. Additionally, the transition to SEPA standards required a revision of the Bank Account Management system. BearingPoint needed a scalable, quickly deployable solution that did not require extensive IT investments.

DACHSER faced high costs and inefficiencies due to manual interventions in payment runs between SAP and a heterogeneous bank landscape. The existing Excel-based reporting systems were prone to errors and imprecision, and there was no integration of bank communication and reporting systems. The project objectives included harmonizing payment processes with SAP usage, reducing complexity due to various bank formats, decentralizing accounting, and eliminating compliance and audit risks.

Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG faced several challenges with their existing system, Finavigate, which was no longer supported by the provider. The company lacked transparency and control over foreign payments and banking authorities, leading to high manual efforts and inefficiencies. The need for a new system was seen as an opportunity to centralize global payments, improve bank connectivity, and achieve better SAP ERP integration. The goal was to use a single platform for electronic banking to increase transparency, control, efficiency, and realize cost benefits.

The Fugro Group faced significant challenges due to its decentralized payment processes. Each country unit managed its payment cycles independently, leading to a lack of centralized visibility and control over the group's liquidity and cash flows. The group had approximately 50 different local ERP systems connected separately to local banks through various e-banking tools. This decentralized structure made it difficult for the central treasury department to monitor and control all account movements on a daily basis. The only transparency came from monthly reports, which often arrived two weeks after transactions had occurred, resulting in delayed and incomplete financial insights.

The Fresenius Group faced the challenge of integrating an increasing number of affiliates into its corporate structure. This required establishing standard payment processes and consolidating bank accounts to optimize payment processes. Additionally, there was a need to simplify the Group-wide IT infrastructure and improve administration options from a central office.

The large number of banks and bank accounts is a result of the growth strategy of Encavis AG. Since 2011, it has increasingly been buying small solar and wind parks throughout Europe. When a new company was acquired, so was its existing bank and account structure. This led to a decentralized treasury landscape with multiple e-banking solutions and tokens. Encavis decided to reorganize the IT infrastructure to centralize group-wide bank account management and streamline all payment transactions. The selection process started in the third quarter of 2018, and the decision was made in December to adopt the TIS platform. The roll-out began in January 2019.

Swissgrid, the national grid company in Switzerland, faced several challenges with their existing payment processes. The company was using various proprietary web solutions for payments, leading to high maintenance costs and efforts within IT. Additionally, there was a lack of expertise in the Treasury and IT departments concerning the numerous connections. Manual processes in the treasury and accounting departments made efficient and structured working methods difficult, increasing the risk of errors and communication disruptions. Swissgrid needed a new solution to automate and standardize their payment processes, achieve Straight-Through-Processing (STP) of all payments, and reduce maintenance costs and compliance risks.

Sport Group faced the challenge of integrating newly acquired entities into their treasury processes as part of their growth strategy. With limited in-house IT resources, creating a straight-through payment process was difficult. The need for central management of payments, consolidation of bank account statements, and transparency over all legal entities, including new acquisitions, was critical. The small treasury team at the headquarters had to streamline processes to manage payments and cash management effectively, despite the rapid growth through acquisitions.

Royal FrieslandCampina NV faced a highly complex ERP environment due to the simultaneous use of several diverse systems. The payment processes were labor-intensive, relying on local e-banking tools, and there was a lack of cash flow transparency. The company aimed to reduce costs by decreasing the number of banking platforms that needed individual management and sought to establish transparency into comprehensive accounts information across its global subsidiaries.

For OSRAM’s Corporate Treasury and Accounts Department, the group’s worldwide presence means organizing a complex network of bank accounts and banking partners in various currencies. In order to take care of transparency and regulatory compliance in this regard, a system is necessary to allow the automated and unitary execution of payments processing, bank statement, and accounts management. With OSRAM’s exit from the Siemens Group in July 2013, such a system was no longer available. At the same time, they faced the problem of having to deal with the settlement and documentation of exception requests in a paper-based form instead of via a software tool. This inevitably often led to the error-prone or delayed communication of information. Because the information on accounts and payment transactions was also stored in a variety of locations, it was hard to organize data analyses and central monitoring. Central data storage for all account-related information was needed to provide maximum transparency through the central management of all information. At the same time, the internal business processes should be standardized as far as possible through automated workflows.

Oettinger Davidoff AG faced challenges in obtaining a better overview of liquidity and standardizing payment transaction processes. The company aimed to establish straight-through processing of important payment transaction streams from the ERP, gain a better overview of daily cash flows, and improve efficiency in working with SAP through automated collection of account statements. The restructuring of the ERP landscape and migration to SAP S/4HANA presented an opportunity to centralize payment transactions and manage accounts more effectively.

NTT Security faced several challenges with their decentralized payment processes, including higher risks of insecurity and non-compliance, reduced productivity due to managing individual e-banking systems, and a lack of a central overview of bank accounts and authorized signatories. The company aimed to further automate payment transactions and bank statement processing, increase auditing acceptability, introduce a unified authorization concept across all banks, and outsource payment format development and maintenance to save on internal IT resources. They also wanted to have all payment-related data available in one system for analytical purposes.

Nintendo faced the challenge of standardizing its payment processes across Europe. The company needed to harmonize communication with various banks and manage multiple bank accounts efficiently. Initially, Nintendo considered developing an in-house solution but found it would be too costly and complex to program all the necessary bank formats. The need for a more cost-effective and user-friendly solution led them to explore external options.

The MANN+HUMMEL Group faced significant challenges in managing over 250 bank accounts across 60 locations in 28 countries. The existing system relied heavily on manual processes using Excel documents and paper-based email workflows, leading to inefficiencies, increased risk of errors, and limited ability to provide up-to-date information. The lack of standardized processes and inadequate audit compliance further complicated the situation, making it difficult to maintain transparency and control over bank account management.

Imperial Logistics faced significant challenges in managing its payment processes due to a lack of transparency in bank signatory powers across different entities, no automatic forwarding of payment requests from ERP systems to banks, and a lack of transparency in cash flows. The company had grown through acquisitions, resulting in 150 legal entities, 200 bank accounts at approximately 40 banks, seven cash pools, and many different signatory powers, all managed without a Treasury Management System. This complexity made it difficult for the Treasury to stay on top of things, necessitating a change to optimize security and compliance with internal and external regulations, create a unified IT landscape, and achieve more transparency and traceability of payment processes.

Adecco, a global staffing company, faced the challenge of managing a highly decentralized treasury operation with separate systems installed at many company operations. The company needed to integrate cash management, improve controls, and increase cash visibility while reducing the number of banking systems used. The TMS played a valuable role in managing debt, investments, foreign exchange, and cash forecasting, but connecting the company and its systems to the banks and the TMS was a significant challenge. Adecco's bank connections were diverse, including SWIFT, H2H, EBICS, and more, supporting a wide variety of payment types. The time and cost of forcing connectivity through a TMS architecture would slow the journey considerably, and a roll-out of the TMS to smaller business units was not practical or cost-effective.