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Manufacturing case study

AVEVA orchestrates business transformation with Oracle

Cognizant works with the industrial software vendor to consolidate a disparate finance systems landscape onto Oracle Cloud Applications for 1,600 finance professionals and 28 countries.

At a glance

Industry
Manufacturing  

Location
United Kingdom

Challenge

Support a global business and finance transformation across 28 countries, including the consolidation of two legacy finance systems onto Oracle Cloud Applications.

Success Highlights

  • Business-critical global Oracle rollout delivered on time and without issues
  • 50% faster month-end close
  • Two-day acceleration in local GAAP reporting

The challenge

AVEVA is a global leader in industrial software as a service (SaaS) with more than 20,000 customers in over 100 countries. Its secure industrial cloud platform and applications enable businesses in many sectors to deliver safe and reliable energy, food, medicines, infrastructure and more.

Named by Fast Company as one of the world's most innovative companies, AVEVA is an autonomous subsidiary of Schneider Electric that delivers cutting-edge technology, actionable insights and collaborative solutions to drive growth, efficiency and sustainability.

Disparate finance systems created inefficiencies

AVEVA's growth by acquisition left the business with a patchwork of financial management and reporting systems, including SAP, Navision and others. This disparate landscape had a lot of duplicate master data, making it tough to gain accurate insight into global financial performance. Siloed processes meant missed opportunities to deliver cost savings and efficiency gains, such as through centralized procurement. Statutory IFRS financial reporting at the group level required a lot of manual work to consolidate and reconcile reports from the company's 91 separate legal entities, taking around 15 days for a typical period close.

At the same time, AVEVA wanted to evolve its business model from selling software licenses to operating on a subscription-based SaaS model. All these challenges could be addressed by consolidating its finance systems onto one global platform with support for a subscription-based revenue model. AVEVA chose Oracle Cloud Applications and engaged its long-standing strategic technology partner Cognizant to deliver the project.

Our approach

This major global transformation project involved implementing a new system and migrating historical data into it, as well as incorporating significant changes to AVEVA's business model. AVEVA's SAP license was also coming up for renewal, giving a non-negotiable deadline for the move to Oracle.

For AVEVA, the objectives of the project were clear. It wanted to standardize on Oracle Cloud Applications across its 28 operating countries using a shared services model for maximum efficiency. Streamlined statutory reporting at both the group and individual entity level was a must and would involve rationalizing AVEVA's legal entity landscape. Lastly, the company's new modes of revenue recognition—primarily projects and subscriptions—had to be reflected in the Oracle implementation.

our approach
Delivering a complex global transformation

Cognizant assembled an expert onshore-offshore team to deliver this complex global finance transformation on time and with zero escalations. Key highlights of our project approach were:

Multi-pillar implementation
We consolidated AVEVA's legacy finance systems onto a suite of Oracle Cloud Applications, including Oracle Revenue and Subscription Management. The implementation involved the consolidation of legal entities from 91 to 52, as well as a change of fiscal calendar for multiple countries.

Multi-wave rollout
The move to Oracle was rolled out in six geographical waves over a three-year period.

Global process standardization
To create a foundation for efficiency, we used a global template to implement standardized business processes and made 651 required localizations across 28 countries.

Subscription model support
AVEVA was an early adopter of Oracle Subscription Management, a revenue management module for subscription-based businesses. We configured the module to match AVEVA's business processes and migrated the company’s 4,000 subscription contracts into it, ensuring no impact to revenue during the transition.

Automated invoice handling
We implemented ReadSoft's invoice scanning solution and matching process for increased accounts payable (AP) efficiency.

Automated GAAP reporting
We automated local in-country Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) reporting through the deployment of secondary ledgers, replacing a manual, spreadsheet-based approach.

Tax portal integration
For efficiency in accounts receivable (AR), we integrated the Oracle platform with relevant government tax portals in ten countries. This enables the automatic capture or updating of inbound statuses and authority number on AR invoices.

Data migration
We were responsible for migrating master data and transaction data from the legacy systems. We automated the entire Extract, Analyze, Transform and Load (EATL) process to support the project's multiple geographical waves. We also delivered some of the more complex migration components like Oracle Projects and Oracle Subscription Management

"We've achieved great things with Cognizant. We've met and exceeded our objectives with all of us working together as one team. We're continuing to partner on new projects, and I'm confident we'll achieve more great results in the future for AVEVA."

Kevin Cornwall, Chief Information Officer, AVEVA

"The key word for us was partnership. Cognizant understood what we were trying to achieve, and they had the experience in the highs and lows of such a large transformation project. They had the ability to adapt and to be agile, which was essential to our success."

Alan Rattigan, ERP Program Director, AVEVA

Business outcomes

This was a complex, business-critical project involving 1,600 business users, 28 countries and 52 legal entities, with oversight at the most senior levels within AVEVA. Despite these challenges, the Cognizant team delivered the entire project on time, with zero deviation and zero escalations. 

Since go-live, AVEVA has gained significant benefits from the transformation, including:

  • 50% faster month-end close: The single Oracle platform and harmonized close processes have reduced month-end close times from 15 to seven days.
  • 2-day acceleration in local GAAP reporting: Custom-built reports for GAAP reporting have reduced local reporting timescales by two days.
  • Time savings for financial controllers: Faster group-level reporting, due to a streamlined Chart of Accounts across legal entities, has freed up senior finance personnel for other value-added tasks. 
  • Future-proofed finance platform: The new Oracle platform will support future legal entity merger programs and further business acquisitions.
  • 25% lower IT support costs: Migrating to cloud and database maintenance has delivered a 25% savings in year-on-year support costs.
Business outcome
A finance foundation for category leadership

Among its digital and innovation ambitions, AVEVA's strategic focus is to become the number one SaaS provider of software and industrial information across multiple sectors globally. To realize this vision, it needed to evolve to a subscription-only business model, consolidate disparate finance systems and streamline its worldwide financial management and reporting processes. With the help of its long-term strategic technology partner Cognizant, it has achieved all three goals: deliver on time, without escalations and with significant benefits in cost and time savings. AVEVA is now set for the future with a finance systems landscape that can support future growth, mergers and acquisitions.


AVEVA orchestrates business transformation with Oracle

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy6xjbI10Os
 

About AVEVA

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, AVEVA is a global leader in industrial software, sparking ingenuity to drive responsible use of the world’s resources. The company’s secure industrial cloud platform and applications enable businesses to harness the power of their information and improve collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners. For more information visit www.aveva.com.