It was a great experience when a senior finance leader shares his success story with other peers in an august gathering, on how his pet EPM initiative went live and how his team and management are happier.
What caught the most attention was his quote:
'We cannot cannot work without Excel'
The theme of the forum discussion was Building a resilient enterprise in a volatile business environment and our Resilitent CFO of the discussion Mr. Rajesh Chopra shared with other CFOs on how SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidations solutions provided both the robust standardization that he wanted to establish and the flexibility the LoB Line Managers wanted in a reporting framework, which they are familiar (you guessed it right - Excel). It was fascinating to watch Mr. Chopra present with passion how his pet epm initiative was a great success and ready to scale for their growth plans that OLAM International has laid out.
Mr. Chopra explained the mantra of repeatable adjacency growth formula, and how it was achieved by providing a great view both to his commodity managers and regional managers using the flexibility of SAP EPM solutions.
OLAM International is in the global agribusiness supplychain company and have great growth plans across the agribusiness value chain right from upstream upto distribution, growing both organically and inorganically.
Using the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidations solutions, the following four pillars of their EPM initiative was achieved:
- Quality Audit Packs
- Monthly Management Information System
- Monthly Business Review Meeting Deck
- Budgeting and Planning
Mr. Chopra highlighted few of the key things for successful EPM initiative, out of which the top 3 were:
1. Selection of right tool - they choose SAP EPM as it offered them the flexibility and also ensured robust standarization, to run it across their 60 countries
2. Right implementation partner - who is not novice but understand both the business and the technology part, in thier case CPM consulting
3. Management commitment to drive this initiative, where Mr. Chopra explained how he spent 20% of his time over 6 months focused on getting this successful
The best part was this was IFRS compliant solution, so it is already handling the covergence to IFRS using SAP EPM solutions.
It was a great discussion for understanding the success of EPM initiatives and the benefits that bring to global companies like OLAM
