Pidilite deploys MAIA 1KEY FCM

Solution eliminates Excel-based closing of books and financial consolidation bottlenecks. By Rajendra Chaudhary

Prasad Parab Chief-IT, Pidilite Industries "We have completely eliminated the manual process of financial consolidation with Excel."

A layman may not know much about Pidilite but ask him about adhesives and the first name that you will most likely hear would be that of Fevicol. Such is the company’s lead in its space. For over half a decade Pidilite Industries has been a pioneer in consumer and specialties chemicals in India.

Pidilite has operations with multiple business units within and outside India. In the recent years with its ever expanding business and continued growth the company found it increasingly difficult to effectively manage its financial consolidation and reporting activities. The company deals with multiple currencies, various accounting standards, and a host of reporting and compliance regulations. The group companies of Pidilite Industries use different financial accounting applications and up until recently Periodical Regulatory Financial Consolidation Reporting used to take nearly a month. The accounts officers at the company’s head office would manually consolidate the data coming from 19 companies in Excel.

As per Prasad Parab, Chief-IT, Pidilite Industries, the accountants and financial officers were facing increasing pressure when it came to financial consolidation of accounts based on companies, business areas, profit centers, divisions or branches, or the SBUs. “The statutory consolidation reporting, which required the reported data to be aggregated into consolidated financial statements on a quarterly basis, had become a major issue.”

Sandeep Batra, Director - Finance, Pidilite Industries said that on too many occasions they would to go to the IT and the finance team would spend hours fixing errors which not only meant longer financial close cycles but also considerable financial overheads. This also meant that critical financial information wouldn’t be available for the decision makers and the investors when they needed it the most.

Pidilite wanted a fast and efficient system which provided it with the ability to complete its accounting cycles and close its books quickly and accurately. It needed more time for value-added analysis, improved control systems and quality, and faster reporting and statutory compliance. Besides this quick access to information for management, investors and key stakeholders was also a priority.

It was towards the end of 2008, that the company came across MAIA Intelligence’s 1KEY FCM solution. Kicking off the project in late 2008, the company went live with the new system around May-June 2009. The solution had to be mapped with the variety of data sources including SAP, Orion ERP and Tally at the backend and tuned as per the needs of the finance and accounts users before the roll out.

It's been nearly two years since Pidilite went live with 1KEY FCM and Parab is all praises for the solution. According to him they have now completely eliminated the manual process of financial consolidation with Excel now results are published within just 4-5 working days of the closure of the period and consolidation also happens in 10 days maximum for all subsidiaries. Financial users can now have multiple Chart of Accounts for single trial balance and can even get financial statements as per IFRS/Schedule VI, etc. Also mapping of Chart of Accounts has now become one time exercise with 1KEY FCM.

Users at Pidilite can now map group as well as ledger as per the statutory requirement and also compare financial statements across any period, any company, any country, rather easily.

The solution has allowed Pidilite to standardize the financial data and consolidate for statutory & management reports from its subsidiaries to adhere to the accounting and valuation standards of the group. 1KEY FCM translates the standardized financial data from the various local currencies into the group currencies. The effects of group-internal relationships (for example, from inter-unit trade and services) has now been eliminated and now the company can calculate the consolidated financial statements as if the group were a single entity.

Some other key benefits of the deployment include Foreign Currency Translation Reserve getting updated automatically in the consolidated financial reports as per current accounting standards and a Working Capital Dashboard being made available to the CFO.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com