GM Financial improves planning and reporting with Fusion Cloud Applications
GM Financial replaced three planning platforms and reduced technology and support costs by nearly $400,000 a year.
United States | Financial Services
“Before Oracle Cloud EPM, we had to aggregate and cleanse data manually and deliver reports through spreadsheets. Now we have a single source of truth that lets us provide reporting faster, with greater accuracy and consistency. That means decisions happen at the right time, by the right people, for the right reasons.”
A growing finance organization hits the limits of manual planning
As the captive finance subsidiary of General Motors, GM Financial provides vehicle financing through dealerships worldwide. Since being acquired by GM in 2010, the company expanded its footprint, added product lines, and supported rising customer demand across North America, Latin America, and Asia.
That growth put pressure on finance. Planning, costing, and reporting were spread across multiple systems and was heavily supported by spreadsheets and manual processes.
To support month-end reviews, variance analysis, and workforce planning, teams extracted data from three different financial applications and additional databases, reconciled it manually, and assembled executive reports by hand. The approach was time-consuming, error-prone, and increasingly difficult to scale.
Finance leaders recognized that continued growth would compound these challenges. Instead of adding more tools, GM Financial wanted a more unified foundation that could evolve alongside the business.
Video: GM Financial Puts Dreams onto Driveways with Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM (2:20)
A unified cloud strategy for finance and people
GM Financial selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Financial Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), both part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Finance and Accounting, to bring financial execution, planning, and analysis onto one platform for decision making. Oracle Cloud Financial Management provides the transactional system of record, while Oracle Cloud EPM supports planning, forecasting, workforce modeling, and performance analysis.
As part of the broader approach, Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) supports alignment between HR and finance for workforce planning, financial performance, and the company’s long-term talent strategy.
Standardizing planning and reporting in Oracle Cloud EPM
With Oracle Cloud EPM, GM Financial consolidated planning and reporting into one environment and replaced three separate platforms. International operations, North America, and Canada businesses standardized planning, activity-based costing, cost analysis, and product profitability modeling in a single EPM environment.
Data that previously required manual extraction and cleansing is now centralized and governed. Executives access insights through role-based dashboards rather than static spreadsheets, helping improve consistency and accelerating decision making.
Workforce planning has been a key use case. Labor is GM Financial’s largest expense, and staffing needs to scale with customer demand. With workforce planning in Oracle Cloud EPM, finance teams model staffing requirements using operational data and time studies across functions such as funding, underwriting, customer experience, and collections, improving accuracy and reducing planning cycle times.
Results across planning and reporting
With the new system in place, business rules execution were reduced from hours to minutes; three planning and reporting platforms were consolidated into one; and annual technology and support costs were reduced by approximately $400,000 versus the previous system. Additionally, the company reported these outcomes, expanded user access without adding systems or instances, reduced manual reconciliation and spreadsheet-based reporting, and improved accuracy and consistency through a single finance platform.
These changes helped finance teams spend less time assembling data and more time interpreting results to support decision making.
Introducing predictive capabilities as part of the roadmap
As part of its roadmap, GM Financial is preparing to leverage predictive planning and machine learning capabilities embedded in Oracle Cloud EPM to help surface trends, highlight anomalies, and support scenario modeling in the cloud.
Finance teams describe a “trust but verify” mindset, using predictive insights to augment human judgment while maintaining accountability. The approach reduces reliance on spreadsheets while improving forecast quality and responsiveness.
A finance platform that evolves with the business
With Oracle Cloud Financial Management and EPM, GM Financial established a scalable finance foundation that supports global growth, continuous improvement, and decision making. As the business evolves, finance can expand planning capabilities, introduce new analytics, and adopt emerging technologies without rebuilding systems or processes.
Partners
Oracle Consulting implemented Oracle Cloud EPM with GM Financial, helping the company revamp its processes as well as learn to use the application. “We've had success not just with Oracle’s technology, but with its consulting services. We’ve been able to innovate and bounce ideas off them and learn about things that we didn’t know,” says Mastropiero.
About the customer
The wholly owned finance subsidiary of General Motors, GM Financial provides auto financing through operations in North America, South America, and Asia. It also offers commercial lending to dealers to help them finance expansion.