The company faced several challenges. Due to several mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures by ECM Industries of New Berlin, Wisconsin, there were many disparate legal entities, divisions & sales channels, brands, and local ERP system trial balances to account for. In fact, yet another acquisition was initiated in the middle of the Oracle Cloud EPM implementation project.

Core issues:

• Inability to collect and correlate data
• Time-consuming manual processes causing a high volume of resource constraints
• Lack of automation and the associated financial and compliance risks
• Inability to support key performance indicators

Replacing a legacy consolidation system, Excel sheets and manual processes, ECM has realized a faster, stronger close process, moving from ten days to five. External reporting is also delivered within the first eight days of the month, gaining about 20 days improvement from their previous process.

This provides ECM with the ability to proactively optimize its business, rather than simply reacting to the previous month's financials. ECM now also has greater visibility across the decentralized business to implement improvements.

Adopting Oracle Cloud EPM, supported by its partner Inoapps, ECM can now rapidly integrate acquisitions, improve process automation, and provide significantly greater KPI and analytics capability to the fast-growing business.

ECM has also benefited from the account reconciliation module and the closing task manager. This has allowed them to have a one-stop shop to monitor activity, and track time and consistency across legal entities, sales changes, and ERP systems.