Wood modernizes financial planning with Oracle Cloud EPM
Environmental consulting business migrates to Oracle Cloud EPM, bringing innovation and speed to its financial planning and budgeting processes.
United Kingdom | Heavy and Civil Engineering Construction
“ It's been a vast difference in terms of the speed, it was a tremendous change. I even have users tell us how much quicker financial planning seems to run with Cloud EPM.”
Business challenges
Headquartered in Aberdeen, Scotland, Wood is a global leader in consulting and engineering across energy and the built environment. It provides consulting, projects, and operations solutions in more than 60 countries, employing around 40,000 professionals. The environmental consulting team is leading Wood’s strategic growth in energy transition and sustainable infrastructure development across in-market sectors including transportation, government, hydrocarbon, industrial, water, and power.
Facing an infrastructure upgrade for a long-established on-premises Hyperion solution, Wood’s environmental consulting business decided to move to the cloud.
In addition, the team needed to transition from manual processes, as some parts of the company were still using spreadsheets for core business functions.
“Oracle Cloud EPM gives us the ability to plan with agility, forecast more accurately, and model different business scenarios. It is a game changer for our business.”—Julie Garner, Financial Reporting Manager, Environmental Consultancy Business, Wood
Why Wood chose Oracle
Wood’s environmental consultancy business decided to migrate all of its planning processes to Oracle Cloud because the integration would provide long-term efficiency and ease of use. Additionally, its existing on-premises planning application had not been upgraded for some time, and the team appreciated the ability to continually access new features on Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).
Results
The environmental consultancy went live on Oracle Cloud EPM within three months, and subsequently added the remaining two consulting business groups in the following 10 weeks. The organization also consolidated financial structures across the three consulting teams and developed a standardized profit and loss financial structure.
After completing the first annual budgeting cycle on Oracle Cloud EPM—a process that was shortened by four days—Wood realized a 38% increase in users compared to the on-premises Hyperion solution. The company also managed to streamline the planning process across the entire consulting business.
Moving from Hyperion on-premises to Oracle Cloud EPM also helped Wood improve system performance, because the company had very little downtime related to integration or data variance issues. Oracle also provided more flexibility in planning efforts and helped make Wood’s data more secure.
Besides the added benefits and flexibility in Oracle Cloud EPM Planning compared to spreadsheets, the team has been able to end its heavy reliance on external consultants. Moreover, the company’s systems are now always up to date with the latest product innovations because of Oracle Cloud EPM’s quarterly release cycle.
Partners
Oracle Cloud EPM was originally implemented by Sierra-Cedar.