The world’s leading steel and mining company, Arcelor Mittal, operates in 160 countries. The company recently required optimisation and correction of its current Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) solution, and called on Futuresense, a specialist in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software. Futuresense has worked with Arcelor Mittal for a number of years, and as a result of their longstanding relationship, the steel producer chose
Futuresense to implement the HFM optimisation and enhancement. Spearheading the project was Associate Director Brian Butler, who explains that the initial HFM solution was incomplete in certain aspects, leading to a number of challenges in the project. “One of the biggest issues Arcelor Mittal had was the fact that the consolidation speed ran very slowly. They wanted that resolved, in addition to a number of other factors, and asked us go and understand the previous build while the system was still running and live build an improved and complete solution that could be merged into the current solution,” he explains. “It took 25 years of experience, skills, hard work and determination to make the project successful,” he explains.
“The application was live and so we had to contend with continuous changes, and while these changes were happening in the main application, a separate application was being built to improvement the system. This second application had to be blended into the main application without any loss of data or downtime.” He adds that the foreign currency translation reserve (FCTR) solution was incomplete in that the calculations were often wrong and needed to be adjusted. They also did not correctly display the value that would be allocated to each component of equity. “The rule file also was very long and could be shortened dramatically but still perform the same functionality,” he says.
Futuresense provided a solution that overcame all of these challenges while ensuring Arcelor Mittal gained the benefit of a perfectly implemented HFM system. The rule file size was reduced from 18 000 lines (3 MB) to 3 304 (0.6 MB) and in another instance from 5 500 lines (1 MB) to 4 000 lines (0.5 MB). Futuresense also provided a more holistic balance sheet account movement metadata solution that made it easier to implement changes as well as easier to understand. “We worked on two client sites, and we managed to drastically improve the consolidation speeds as well. At one site, we improved the consolidation speed by 75% (from 12 minutes per month to 3 minutes per month) and at the other one, we improved the speed by 90% (from 2.5 hours for a 12 month consolidation to 15 minutes).
We also provided complete and working tax reconciliation from accounting profit to tax profit and the temporary differences on an entity and consolidated level,” Butler says. “We also converted the applications from an EPMA methodology to a classic methodology as this is a better application. EPMA is no longer supported in version 11.2 of the on-premises oracle EPM software, so we had to work around this.” Arcelor Mittal was so pleased with the implementation that the company heaped praise on Futuresense.
“It is a pleasure to have Futuresense as a partner, and the quality of the work and solution provided far surpassed what we were expecting,” says [Arcelor Mittal Spokesperson]. “We had an immense challenge in optimising our HFM implementation, and Futuresense exceeded all our expectations, providing a solution that meets our needs now, and in the future.”