Pearson gains security and flexibility in budget planning with Oracle Cloud EPM

Founded in 1844 in the United Kingdom, Pearson is the largest learning company in the world with more than 22,500 employees across 70 countries. The company provides digital content, assessment, and services to students, educational institutions, businesses, governments, and other partners around the world. The company is committed to helping people develop the skills they need to improve their employability and succeed in the changing labor market.

With a presence in Brazil for more than 40 years, Pearson grew through acquisitions of educational institutions of various sizes and segments. Its business lines span early childhood education to corporate and professional training.

After adapting to the remote working model during the pandemic, one of Pearson’s greatest challenges was to protect the data within its ecosystem, especially data related to budgets, planning, revenue, customers, products, and employee benefits and salaries.

Although the company’s previous financial planning tool had a projection feature, it lacked planning capabilities, and was heavily customized for Pearson's needs. This caused difficulties in creating comparison scenarios. The company wanted a more secure, flexible, and collaborative solution to better meet its needs.

Pearson already had a global partnership with Oracle, but the Brazilian branch had the freedom to choose whatever solution would meet its needs. After extensive market research, the company selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for its extensive data security features, scenario planning capabilities, and ability to support a high number of concurrent users.

Oracle Cloud EPM would offer stronger data security with different levels of access that allowed users to view only the data needed for the task. Furthermore, the company could create multiple scenarios for various company brands, giving flexibility whenever required. The application’s functionality meant that staff wouldn’t need to constantly call for technical support.

Finally, Oracle Cloud EPM would help the company avoid data loss.

After implementing Oracle Cloud EPM, Pearson realized several improvements in its day-to-day operations. Employees now make all necessary changes to budgets at any stage. This was crucial to support decision-making, because the financial area acts more as a business partner for the several brands within the group.

Security also improved. Admins can restrict or segment access to data, preventing employees from having undue access to confidential information.

In addition, Pearson reviews budgets much faster. Before, the budget review process would take three or more days but now the task is completed in only 12 hours. In addition, Pearson has the ability to budget about 9,000 products within the tool, which was previously accomplished one brand at a time.

Pearson also saw payroll reductions using Oracle Cloud EPM. The company's payroll dropped about 20% because of Cloud EPM’s efficiency.

Pearson relied on mentoring support from KPMG to implement Oracle Cloud EPM. The project was completed in only three months.

In addition to KPMG's mentoring, Pearson relied on Oracle video support. In 90 days, the company was able to register all the formulas and rules in the system to report back to its headquarters in the UK. After a successful implementation in such a short time, Pearson became a reference case and participated in several Oracle events to share its experience.