Carphone Warehouse, the mobile communications retailer with an annual turnover of £2.4bn, is set to greatly improve its approach to planning, budgeting and financial reporting by investing in technology solutions from Hyperion. Carphone Warehouse has purchased Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, and Hyperion Master Data Management Server. Around 200 users will benefit from the use of this software.
According to Nigel Langstaff, Group Director of Finance at Carphone
Warehouse: "As a new generation retailer, we aim to exceed our customer's expectations by providing an innovative approach to service. To stay at the front of this dynamic and rapidly moving industry, we constantly develop new ideas and services for our customers. We realised we needed to apply a similarly innovative approach to our financial management and planning systems. Hyperion offers us the best way to do this by providing a truly integrated approach."
Carphone Warehouse purchased Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, and Hyperion Master Data Management Server. Around 200 users will benefit from the use of this software.
Carphone Warehouse, an existing Hyperion Essbase customer, has now increased the number of users from 32 to nearly 200. Hyperion Essbase allows for centralised maintenance of dimensions, hierarchies, calculations, and business rules. Carphone Warehouse intends to now expand its usage of Hyperion Essbase to create a unified analytical platform.
Hyperion Planning is a centralised, Web-based planning, budgeting and forecasting solution that drives collaborative, integrated, event-based planning processes throughout the enterprise for a wide range of financial and operational needs. As an integral part of the Hyperion Business Performance Management suite, Hyperion Planning will allow Carphone Warehouse to track and monitor business plans and forecasts, translating strategic objectives into operational goals and targets.
Says Langstaff: "For financial planning, we had previously used MS Excel.With Hyperion Planning, we now have the ability to more easily generate rolling forecasts. It will be a big improvement over our manually intensive use of spreadsheets."
Hyperion Financial Management is a Web-based application that delivers global collection, financial consolidation, reporting and analysis. It will be maintained by Carphone Warehouse's group finance team. It is intended that Carphone Warehouse will be able to improve its financial close and reporting process and reduce internal control risk. Carphone Warehouse finance personnel should be able to spend less time on processing and more time on value-added analysis, as well as providing a single version of the truth to support financial management and statutory reporting. Says Langstaff, "Hyperion Financial Management will give us a far greater degree of integrity and will help us significantly improve our approach to reporting at both a group level and business unit level."
The final component of Carphone Warehouse's purchase is the Hyperion Master Data Management (MDM) Server. This synchronizes Business Performance Management (BPM) master data across analytic applications, data warehouses, transaction systems and business performance management applications. BPM master data defines enterprise standards through KPIs and reporting structures for key BPM processes, which include financial reporting, compliance, planning, analysis, business modeling and scorecarding. Carphone Warehouse finance personnel can be directly involved in the iterative process of managing complex, rapidly changing Business Performance Management (BPM) master data, rather than having IT manage this for them.
Langstaff says, "The key benefit we expect to gain is a single version of the truth in terms of financial management, reporting, planning, budgeting and data management. We believe we will gain significant process efficiencies at a result of investing in Hyperion software."
