Tight month-end closes and financial reporting were a challenge for Fletcher Insulation. IQX Business Solutions came to the rescue with the GL Wand from Excel4Apps. Fletcher Insulation is a producer of Australia’s leading insulation brands, with three manufacturing facilities and 14 branch locations located throughout the country.
The business challenge
For Fletcher’s Finance Group, extremely tight month-end closes were a challenge in the company’s SAP R/3 environment. Financial reports were due to the various branches and manufacturing plants just two days after SAP data was finalised each month. Plant accountants and managers could then use profit and loss (P&L) statements to perform variance, ratio, and other types of analyses. By the fourth day, the final consolidated financial reports were due from Finance to Fletcher’s parent company. For finance users, creating or updating reports in SAP required programming assistance from busy IT staff, meaning report generation could take up to two months. To bypass this requirement, finance users would download SAP data into Excel and manipulate it in complex spreadsheets, which required high-level Excel expertise and introduced the potential for error in financial statements.
Click here to read the full article in the October 2010 edition of Inside SAP.
