The successful family-owned business De Heus is recognised as a global leader in the animal nutrition industry. To support their financial reporting and consolidation processes, the organisation relies on SAP BPC. Thanks to several targeted enhancements and process optimisations, the finance team now has significantly more time for monitoring performance, analysing results, and delivering valuable insights.
All data from a single source
The company has experienced strong growth in recent years and is developing its activities worldwide. De Heus has been using SAP BPC for management information and statutory annual accounts. At De Heus, there was a desire to spend less time reporting and spend more time on the content, thereby also increasing the application of SAP BPC. Therefore, it was necessary to change the reporting process. The result is one source that is filled better and with more information, from which all necessary data is analysed. De Heus asked cpmview to support them in this process.
SAP BPC as a well-oiled machine
Additional licences were purchased to ensure that the reporting process in SAP BPC could operate efficiently. The expansion of the number of licenses enabled De Heus to carry out their reports entirely independently. The next step was to move to version 10.1 of SAP BPC. This version offers more possibilities in monitoring what has been reported in a dashboard, which indicates the result of validations for consistency in reports. For example, for the central team, it is immediately visible where they need to step in during the reporting process and where possible incorrect reporting happens. 10.1 also works better together with Office 365 from Microsoft, allowing to make use of graphical presentations (e.g., EBITA bridges) of results.
More time for analysis
To make reporting as efficient as possible, a lot of time and attention have been spent on making instructions and educating users. The combination of additional licences, training, documentation, and validation checks ensures that these improvements have been fully realised: reporting takes less time, data quality has increased, and the analyses have improved as well.
Applications on SAP BPC with MS Office 365
The use of Office 365 has also been embedded in the budget process. A PowerPoint template has been developed that is directly linked to SAP BPC. Business units enter their budget data in SAP BPC, after which charts and tables are automatically populated in PowerPoint. This ensures an efficient process for the business units and consistent, standardised reporting for the head office in Ede.
Dashboards
In the future, the wish is to prepare the corporation tax return directly from the SAP BPC database. This is a project that is currently being worked on. Another upcoming project is creating dashboards, which would make information available on mobile devices with the possibility to zoom in on the various activities in the company.
Wim van Soest, Group Controller, De Heus: “SAP BPC now meets all expectations you may have of a tool like this. We have better insights and that gives ease. The data is reliable and the time that we gain can be used more strategically.”
