Challenges

• Streamline and simplify month-end, budgeting, planning, profit and loss, and CAPEX reporting related to clinical trials carried out at 82 offices and 6 subdivisions in 40 countries
• Enable decision-makers in each division to create their own alternate hierarchies and meaningful views of spend data versus budget
• Give divisional managers the ability to carry out ad-hoc analyses to monitor expenses against budget for each cost center and division and rectify areas where overspending occurs
• Improve timeliness and accuracy of medium- and long-term forecasting at divisional and corporate levels

Solutions

• Improved month-end financial reporting by replacing Excel-based reporting tools with a single instance of Oracle Hyperion Planning
• Reduced risk from working with multiple spreadsheets that needed monthly manual consolidation to increase the accuracy, timeliness, and granularity of planning and reporting intelligence
• Extracted actual, budget, and CAPEX data directly from Oracle Financials with Oracle Data Integrator and loaded that data into Oracle Hyperion Planning to view by country, office, division, and project, and to drill down to individual transaction level
• Automated separation of data into hierarchies for functions, such as IT, sales, and marketing, as required by different divisions and decision-makers, without the need for manual coding or intervention from the IT team
• Provided role-based access to data via Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office, which enabled users to view, import, manipulate, distribute, and share insights in Microsoft Excel
• Benefited from automated data extraction to refresh information daily instead of monthly and give decision-makers near-real-time intelligence for strategic planning
• Enabled end-users to run cost allocations and attribute the appropriate percentage of each expense to the relevant division or activity
• Conducted constant currency analyses to determine the effect of fluctuating exchange rates or other factors related to profit and loss and the balance sheet, and incorporated that analysis in planning and reporting scenarios
• Ran regular variance analyses to identify and understand the causes of overspending, control ongoing costs, and refine future budgets
• Automated the generation of profit and loss summaries at regional, divisional, and office level, using Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting
• Produced CAPEX, variance, allocation , and revaluation reports configured within the planning process
• Created online management reporting packs with automatic refreshes every 24 hours

Why Oracle

ICON chose Oracle Hyperion Planning for its ability to provide in-depth, holistic visibility for all parts of the business and their impacts on operational planning.

"ICON evaluated a number of different BI solutions to meet our requirements, but it was clear that the Oracle Hyperion solutions offered better prebuilt integration with Oracle E-Business Suite. We also received strong product and partner references from peer companies, and that made our decision a relatively easy one, "said Mark Connolly, director of group financial systems, ICON plc.

"Oracle Hyperion Planning gives us an enterprise view of data while enabling all group divisions to produce their reports," said Jonathan Curtain, corporate director financial planning and analysis, ICON plc.

Partner

Oracle Gold Partner Codec-dss managed the implementation and provided support and training. The company’s expertise in enterprise performance management and business intelligence, and its track record of successful implementations, made it the preferred partner for ICON.

"Codec has enabled us to leverage Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Hyperion Financial Reports to transform the efficiency and timeliness of planning and reporting at ICON. We now plan to extend its benefits to forecasting, “Curtain said.

Resources

• Read more Success Stories about Oracle Hyperion Planning