GFKL Financial Services AG Extends Infrastructure Scalability and Improves Financial Management Transparency and Efficiency
 
 

GFKL Financial Services AG Extends Infrastructure Scalability and Improves Financial Management Transparency and Efficiency

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GFKL Financial Services AG, a holding company, is one of Germany's leading providers of receivables management services and software. In 2004, GFKL was the first German company to receive a servicer rating from Standard & Poor’s. Its rating, “strong, outlook stable,” was the highest possible servicer rating awarded, making GFKL one of four top-rated European companies in its class.

After many years of steady growth, GFKL found that its database infrastructure and enterprisewide reporting and financial management systems had reached their limits. The company embarked on an initiative to create a highly scalable data infrastructure and a standardized financial management environment for unification, greater transparency, and process efficiency. 

GFKL looked to Oracle’s technology, solutions, and tools to optimize its data infrastructure, gain new financial insight, and improve budgeting processes. By the 2010 year-end closing, the outcome of GFKL’s strategic decision to deploy Oracle was already apparent. Using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, GFKL consolidated data from all subsidiaries much faster than in years before, and the results were higher quality.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from GFKL Financial Services AG

  • “With Oracle, we aren’t just optimizing our budgeting processes. We are also significantly reducing process cycles, which drives down costs.” – Andre Pesarese, Head of Network and Systems Operation, GFKL Financial Services AG

  • Expand existing database infrastructure to support the company’s rapidly growing receivables management business and a workforce that was growing at the rate of 25% per year
  • Create a uniform financial management structure to better support receivables management business processes following a decision to refocus core operations on this market sector
  • Reengineer finance and reporting structures to ensure standardized processes across the enterprise while maintaining separate reporting for the corporation and its customer portfolio―a time-consuming manual process in the legacy environment
  • Enable detailed comparison of subsidiaries to evaluate performance levels and share best practices
  • Simplify and align budget planning process to avoid repeated, ad-hoc budgeting adjustments within each fiscal year and to enable more accurate forecasting
  • Create a uniform data warehouse to deliver key performance indicators (KPIs) derived directly from the receivables management systems

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Optimized the company’s Oracle Database 11g environment using various Oracle solutions and tools to ensure high performance of all receivables management applications, while managing the database more efficiently
  • Ensured data infrastructure scalability to support robust growth
  • Standardized financial management and drove pervasive intelligence across the enterprise by linking strategic, financial, and operational management processes using Oracle Hyperion solutions
  • Accelerated the company’s consolidated annual financial statement and enabled more detailed financial data―supporting more agile decisions
  • Implemented uniform, tool-supported separation of internal and external reporting, so that reporting serves as a control mechanism to ensure that payables collection can be guaranteed as contractually defined with customers
  • Simplified and standardized the financial reporting, improving data quality and reducing the monthly reporting process by one week
  • Simplified and unified planning processes by integrating financial data―which enables resilient budgets and two to four planning alignment sessions per fiscal year to ensure sound decision making
  • Provided initial plans for a uniform data warehouse to support daily, instead of monthly, internal and external financial reports

Why Oracle

Due to a tremendous increase in data volume, scalability was mandatory for GFKL, so it chose Oracle as its strategic database partner.

During the selection process, GFKL found Oracle’s functionality, such as planning and reporting features, and project pricing was superior to other vendors. Oracle’s various packs ensured optimal usage and efficient administration of Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g.