Oracle Customer Success—McGregor Fashion Group B.V.

McGregor Fashion Group Shortens Period Closes by 30% and Gains 13- Week, Cash-Flow Forecasting

Oracle Hyperion Financial Management transforms raw data into the business knowledge we need to drive towards our goal of becoming a leading, dynamic, enduringly successful, international fashion group.

— Hans Platschorre, CFO, McGregor Fashion Group B.V.

McGregor Fashion Group B.V. is one of Europe’s most successful fashion houses in the upper-market segment. It has 3,000 multibrand stores, 265 shop-in-shops, and more than 140 of its own and franchised stores under the McGregor, Gaastra, and ADAM Menswear names. The company operates in Europe and the Middle East.

Business Challenge

Accelerate period closes by streamlining consolidation and analysis of sales figures for each brand, clothing type, region, country, retail outlet, and web shop
Give country controllers, sales teams, merchandisers, and business analysts timely, relevant, consistent performance data, down to brand, apparel type, and outlet level

Enhance decision-making in the competitive, season-driven retail fashion industry by responding rapidly to information requests from line-of-business and country managers
Improve planning and budgeting through effective, longer-term, cash-flow forecasting
Streamline fulfillment of monthly reporting commitments to country controllers, business-unit heads, and stakeholders
Boost productivity of finance teams and reduce need for IT’s input to build reports or construct alternative data views for business users

Completed period closes on the 20th instead of 30th day of the following month—30% faster with Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, since it replaced a legacy system, which was restricted to profit and loss and balance sheet accounting,
Create an advanced, automated global financial consolidation, analysis, and reporting platform to accelerate financial roll up and extend visibility

Generated monthly management reports at the same time as period-close reports using the intelligence generated with Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, which enabled McGregor to integrate financial and management reporting in a single system
Gained immediate business value by using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management’s intuitive functionality and prebuilt templates to replace financial reports in multiple formats from 15 countries with a single, structured-reporting format and globally consistent codes and definitions
Increased productivity of the head-office finance team by 10% to 20% in six months by eliminating the need to extract sales figures for each brand, country, outlet, and line from disparate systems and re-enter data to compile monthly, quarterly, and annual closes
Provided responses to ad hoc requests for performance figures from brand managers, country controllers, and business planners in minutes instead of hours or even days, which improved timeliness and quality of decision-making in the dynamic retail sector
Benefited from new financial transparency to prepare a rolling, 13-week, cash forecast for each upcoming quarter for the first time—giving decision-makers an accurate estimate of likely future sales based on past performance and providing a sound basis for planning and budgeting
Used Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office to allow business users to import data into Excel and interrogate financial data for each region, country, store, and brand
Enabled business users to create reports using data extracted from the financial system and complete planning and forecasting tasks in the familiar MS Office environment
Used Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office to analyze key performance indicators, such as foot traffic per outlet, visitor-to-customer conversion rates, average spend per transaction, and customer loyalty to a particular brand or store
Benefited from Oracle Hyperion Financial Management to benchmark and compare sales per country; brand; and type of outlet, whether its multibranded, shop-in-shop, or McGregor’s own stores
Used intelligence extracted through Oracle Hyperion Financial Management to identify the best- and worst-performing brands, countries, and channels each month, which helped determine the focus of future investment and steer strategy planning
Used the finance, user-centric functionality to minimize need for input from the IT team by allowing business users to create reports in the familiar MS Office environment

Oracle Hyperion Financial Management is the Mercedes of consolidation tools. It allows finance teams to combine cost, performance, and operational data, understand what drives profitability, and focus on outcomes that best achieve our strategic goals.

— Hans Platschorre, CFO, McGregor Fashion Group B.V.

About McGregor Fashion Group B.V.

Headquarters

Driebergen-Rijsenburg, The Netherlands

Employees

1,000

Annual Revenue

$100 to $500 Million

McGregor Fashion Group B.V.

Oracle Solutions Used

Oracle Hyperion Financial Management

Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office

Published: Dec 05, 2013