Grupo SURA gives affiliates more autonomy with Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM
The financial services company efficiently consolidates financial statements from more than 80 companies using Oracle Cloud EPM.
Colombia | Financial Services
“With Oracle Cloud EPM, our subsidiaries’ autonomy increased significantly. Today each entity controls its processes independently, streamlining our workflow.”
Business challenges
Grupo SURA is a financial services company supporting more than 75 million customers in 11 countries in Latin America, providing insurance, pension, savings, and investment services. The company heads the SURA-Bancolombia conglomerate.
As Grupo SURA’s financial data increased, the financial consolidation period lengthened significantly. What previously took 5 to 7 minutes per entity came to take up to 20 minutes, and sometimes the platform blocked processes entirely. These delays directly affected subsidiaries, slowing down internal processes and leading to missed deadlines. Grupo SURA needed faster processing times for a smoother financial close.
With Oracle Cloud EPM, Grupo SURA cut the time needed to run core consolidated reports from more than 4 hours to less than 90 minutes.
Why Grupo SURA chose Oracle
Grupo SURA chose Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM based on its ongoing relationship with Oracle. Those experiences gave Grupo SURA confidence that Oracle could facilitate the transition to cloud applications and generate time and cost savings.
The decision was also based on the successful experience of SURA Asset Management, a subsidiary, which had previously migrated to Oracle Cloud EPM. Oracle also stood out for proposing specific solutions and enhancements to address the company’s challenges, based on their history of collaboration.
Results
Using Oracle Cloud EPM gave Grupo SURA subsidiaries the autonomy to run processes without relying on a centralized IT or finance team. That autonomy streamlines the workflow and provides flexibility in decision-making. More efficient reporting also frees employees from waiting around for the corporate team to deliver reports.
Grupo SURA’s execution times for processes also improved. Consolidating data from a subsidiary, which used to take 15 minutes, now takes just 3 minutes. The subconsolidated report went from 1 hour to 25 minutes, and the primary consolidated from more than 4 hours to less than 90 minutes, approximately.
Having all companies in the group on one cloud-based financial consolidation platform makes alignment more efficient, since it improves reporting quality and visibility of data across different entities in the group.
Implementing Oracle Cloud EPM significantly improved the stability of the Grupo SURA platform. The company now has consistent uptime, without the need to restart its systems due to locks or failures of the tool.
Another important benefit comes from reduced backup data volume, which dropped from 32 GB to 9 GB. Oracle Cloud EPM also optimized the transfer of information to other environments. Previously, this process could take up to more than half a day, and now only takes two hours. Database refreshes dropped from four hours to 15 minutes.
Partners
The implementation was led by IZE Consultores, along with Oracle’s team of experts, and lasted about eight months. The result was a successful and optimized transition for Grupo SURA.
About the customer
Grupo SURA is an investment manager with nearly 80 years of experience in the financial sector, providing savings, health, and insurance services.