Beca redefines its finance roles with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP best practices

Beca, an employee-owned engineering services firm headquartered in New Zealand, has helped design iconic structures throughout the Asia-Pacific region, such as Bangkok’s Queen Sirikit National Convention Center and Singapore’s CapitaSpring skyscraper. The company’s decades-old finance system kept staff anchored to manual processes, devoting time and energy that would have been better spent on analysis, such as evaluating client project performance. With Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Fusion Data Intelligence, finance is now focused on providing data-driven, actionable insights to decision-makers rather than on transaction processing and report generation.

Beca’s more than 4,000 employees share ownership of the design, advisory, and engineering firm, nurturing a culture of creative people aiming to “transform our world.” Within its finance department, however, the firm’s aging finance system slowed down the speed of doing business and, at times, the mundane aspects of the work sapped employee satisfaction. Beca evaluated software from multiple providers to make what it considered a generational change in its financial management. Its leadership chose Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Fusion Data Intelligence based on the completeness of the software, including its strong risk and compliance and project management capabilities. Also, Oracle stood out from the competition based on its extensive cloud ERP client base and market position as a top applications and technology provider.

Beca implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and is adopting the software’s built-in best practices to not just automate processes but to also reimagine roles across finance. This shift includes using Cloud ERP to help strengthen financial discipline for project management throughout its core business. Oracle Cloud ERP also makes risk management and compliance tasks easier through capabilities such as automated monitoring and reporting on access controls and activity, order-to-cash processes, separation of duties, and similar elements aimed at bolstering the firm’s internal controls and security.

Beca is rolling out ERP analytics in Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence to about 1,500 employees, giving them a clear view of financial performance through a better understanding of revenue, cost, and profitability drivers. The CFO’s finance team members have moved from spending most of their time on routine transaction processing and report generation to focusing on delivering better performance indicators and deeper insights to decision-makers. That helps to increase employee job satisfaction along with the firm’s performance.