Thought Leadership

Advisory

Finance

Webinar: Sorting through Technology Options
Did you miss the IAPP webinar on March 18th? View the taped session here! More...

Webinar:
Unclaimed property laws are confusing, constantly changing, and differ among each jurisdiction. Furthermore, states have become much more diligent in their reporting requirements and audit process. You need to accurately report your unclaimed property, but do you understand the filing requirements? Are you under or over complying? Can you keep up with the ever changing laws? More...

Unclaimed Property Audits:
You are the Controller of a Fortune 500, have your hands in a lot of Finance and Operations matters, but you receive a letter one day from the state of Delaware indicating that your company is about to be the focus of an Unclaimed Property audit. The state will not be handling the audit – they have assigned this responsibility to a 3rd party audit firm. One that has the resources and wherewithal to engage in an extensive review of your company’s books and records - and is paid a percentage of the amount they squeeze out of your company. You set the letter down, look at your in-basket and see a dozen more similar-looking envelopes – each from another state. More...

Corralling Your Unclaimed Property:
It’s amazing how many organizations spend so much valuable time and financial resources applying “best practices” with their Unclaimed Property issues after stale-dated property has become a problem. This is akin to a cattle rancher paying a lot of money to routinely have his cattle rounded up rather than spending a little money to fix the latch on the gate. More...

How does your Unclaimed Property function stack up?
Is your organization setting itself up for an unwanted unclaimed property audit? Many companies are either not aware of state unclaimed property laws, or have largely ignored them – hoping the state auditors will never come knocking on their door. Beware – the states are determined to begin rigorously enforcing escheatment laws to offset budget shortfalls brought on by tax cuts and other diminished fee collections. More...

Unclaimed Property:
With the government’s increased emphasis on identifying and collecting abandoned property as a means to jumpstart lagging revenues, our clients are learning that failure to implement strategies to minimize exposure and potential liability represent significant lost opportunity costs. More...

Muticurrency Processing and Reporting:
The company deployed an enterprise chart of accounts (COA) and accounting business processes to its international subsidiaries to increase efficiency and enable the enterprise finance departments to better support future business growth and expansion. This deployment positioned the company to take advantage of improved enterprise multicurrency and financial reporting capabilities. More...

Charting the Course through Challenging Times:
Anyone can manage in good times. The question is: How will one guide their organization through the storm of economic uncertainty? Tough times require tough decisions, but tough times can also be a catalyst for dramatic change. Change that not only allows a company to survive, but positions it for future success when the economy rebounds. Cutting waste and inefficiencies throughout the organization now will conserve operating capital, allowing for strategic investments when the time is right and the waters are calm. More...

CFO Research: Exposing the True Sources of Profits:
In September of 2008, CFO Research Services (a unit of CFO Publishing Corp.) and MarketSphere launched a research program to explore senior finance executives’ view on current business practices and their order-to-cash processes. Among other issues, the survey asked about profitability data and measures; training on finance IT systems and planning, budgeting, and forecasting practices; and current forecast use and accuracy. More...

Financial Systems Selection and Implementation:
Due to its overwhelming growth, this company’s legacy systems for financial accounting, human resources, and agency management were becoming cumbersome -- limiting their reporting, functionality, and integration capabilities. More...

Accelerated Close:
The month-end close cycle for this $7.5B organization takes approximately seven to 10 days to close the ledger system, two days to load the general ledger (GL) information into their Management Reporting system, and another three to five days to analyze and report financial results. More...

Costing Analytics Success:
Two years ago, this company completed their first costing project that helped in making assessments of whether to make or buy technology and products. The first phase costing project also helped to normalize plant standards and develop an internal view of fixed costs versus variable costs. More...

Building Compliance:
Virtually every company has unclaimed property, such as un-cashed accounts payable and payroll checks, credit accounts receivable balances, and uncashed gift cards. States require all companies to track such stale-dated liabilities and turn over the related cash value after a specific dormancy period has been reached. Unclaimed property compliance is complicated. More...

Liability Reduction:
As enterprises are subject to the unclaimed property regulations of each state, this organization found itself reporting to approximately 20 different jurisdictions. Further, due to a lack of consolidation, it was filing separately for each legal entity, resulting in nearly 600 unclaimed property reports each year. More...

Unclaimed Property Compliance:
Although a leader in their market, this company was suffering from several issues when it came to Unclaimed Property. First, not all of their business units were reporting unclaimed property and past filings were inconsistent or non-compliant. Further, the overall business processes were relatively immature. More...

Shared Services:
As a leading services firm to the financial and healthcare industries, this company prides itself on delivering innovative products and services that become world-class standards. This mission is driven throughout the organization, including their support functions. Therefore, when the finance organization wanted to assess the reasonableness of setting up a Shared Services Center. More...

The Finance Review
This company was evolving and continuing on a rapid growth rate organically and through the completion of multiple acquisitions. The finance organization recognized the need to shift their role within the organization as the business model continued to evolve. More...

Integrated Business Planning

Scorecarding:
During the initial outreach by new executive leadership, the company realized several issues. First, across its 34 business units, business plans were not strategically aligned, nor were there adequate measurements or a formal system to monitor performance. Furthermore, the overall strategic process was not linked to the budgeting or planning process. In fact, they found that the planning process was manual and required over 4 months to complete. More...

Merger & Acquisition Integration:
Facing several competitive pressures, the subsidiary developed three strategies. First, they wanted to broaden their product offering through the introduction of a lower-priced product with higher margins. Second, they wanted to establish a private label program to increase their distribution base. Third, they wanted to enhance their current market position with a roll-up strategy through a dealer acquisition. More...

Integrated Business Planning Success:
Although its parent company will help transform and re-energize the organization’s financial health, the company realized it must create a goal of returning to positive system-wide same-store sales growth over time. Concurrently, the company wanted to leverage its core strength- its ‘market know-how’- that had previously been under utilized in business planning and operations. More...

Supply Chain

Procurement Success:
In 2008, the company acquired the utility and merchant service operations of another energy provider. The acquisition presented several challenges, and significant roadblocks stood in the way of a successful merger between the two entities. Disparate processes, systems, and organizational structures, along with stark cultural differences had many organizational design and change management implications. These challenges were specifically amplified for the Supply Chain areas, as executive management deemed it critical to have 100% operational effectiveness within the Supply Chain function on Day One, the first day of combined operations. A successful Supply Chain integration was essential for the combined company to realize its cost savings target. The company turned to MarketSphere, relying on its industry and supply chain expertise to design a highly integrated and effective supply chain organization. More...

Source to Settle Transformation:
Bringing deep experience in procurement and payment processes and systems, as well as change management, MarketSphere designed a comprehensive Source-to-Settle solution and deployed it across the enterprise using a phased approach with tight communication and deployment execution. The solution included both business process improvements and best practice technologies to automate process and transactional activities, encapsulated in customized training in order to accelerate skills ramp-up of the process and technology improvements. More...

Source-to-Settle Lifecycle:
Can a Fortune 500 company truly realize several millions of dollars in cost reduction by streamlining, automating and transforming their entire sourcing-through-settlement lifecycle? Well, this major financial services institution did. This paper will highlight how the company leveraged transaction automation, process re-engineering, strategic sourcing, and organizational alignment to drive enterprise Source-to-Settle (S2S) transformation and cost reduction. This overview will present business challenges, solutions, benefits, and lessons learned, as well as provide a practical approach to technology-driven procurement and payables. More...

Accounting and Supply Systems Upgrade
In addition to requiring automated inventory tracking, the company wished to upgrade its legacy accounting and supply chain systems which had prevented it from pursuing growth and expansion plans. The company also wished to enable customer self-service for placing and reviewing orders, achieve real-time interfacing between bar code technology and the operations system, and attain more robust quality control and tracking. More...

Enterprise Source-to-Settle Transformation:
Operating as several autonomous business units, this company had fully decentralized and redundant sourcing, procurement, contract management, and accounts payable functions. In addition, the processes supporting these functions were inconsistent across business units, as well as completely paper-based and manually intensive. More...

Organizational Performance

Workforce Planning:
Long before emails and global positioning satellites existed, tribes kept pace with one another through smoke signals and tom toms. Stories were passed from generation to generation and the habits of survival where part of their folklore. Tribal knowledge passed from father to son, mother to daughter and generation to generation. Today, your business, and in fact all businesses are at risk of losing their “drum beat.” The “Graying” of the workforce - the aging of the Baby Boomers - beg the question… “What is important?” More...

Driving a Customer-Centric Culture:
Exceeding customer expectations by providing superior products and customer service is a long-standing core value of this manufacturing company. However, company leadership recently recognized that repeat customer business had significantly decreased over the last few years. After soliciting former customers to find out why they had taken their business elsewhere, the company discovered that more than two-thirds left due to poor customer service. To correct this problem and reclaim the company’s reputation as #1 in customer service, the executive leadership team commenced a subset of their direct reports (the senior leadership team) to take on the realization of this goal and commissioned MarketSphere to provide project management and subject-matter expertise. As the overall goal would require several years to achieve, the chief objective of this six (6) month assessment effort was to identify the steps necessary to transform the company culture to one that values customer satisfaction as king. More...

Change Assurance:
Operating as several autonomous business units, this company had fully decentralized and redundant sourcing, procurement, contract management, and accounts payable functions. Operational functions were geographically dispersed, made up of seven business unit headquarters, franchise and company-owned district offices and over 12,000 retail and service related locations throughout the globe. In addition, the processes supporting these functions were inconsistent across business units, as well as completely paper-based and manually intensive. More...

Merger Integration:
In 2008, the company acquired the utility and merchant service operations of another energy provider. The acquisition presented several challenges, and significant roadblocks stood in the way of a successful merger between the two entities. Disparate processes, systems, and organizational structures, along with stark cultural differences had many organizational design and change management implications. These challenges were specifically amplified for the Supply Chain areas, as executive management deemed it critical to have 100% operational effectiveness within the Supply Chain function on Day One, the first day of combined operations. A successful Supply Chain integration was essential for the combined company to realize its cost savings target. The company turned to MarketSphere, relying on its industry and supply chain expertise to design a highly integrated and effective supply chain organization. More...

Workforce Rightsizing:
With its talent and operations dispersed all over the globe, this manufacturing company had become mired down with the costs and complexities required to maintain their numerous facilities. Improvement required substantive organizational changes to enable material reductions in SG&A and operational costs. That is when the company brought in MarketSphere, who embarked upon a project to define, develop and execute a strategic global operations strategy and rightsizing initiative to more effectively and efficiently facilitate the company’s profitable growth objective. More...

Corporate Acquisition
Along with the merger of any two companies, comes the underlying challenge of merging their systems. These companies were on two completely different platforms — the acquiring company on LawsonTM and the acquired company on Oracle® PeopleSoftTM Enterprise Human Capital Management (HCM) (core HR, benefits, and payroll) and financial functions (General Ledger, AR/Billing, AP, PO, AM, and several custom bolt-on applications). More...

IT Governance
Through continued growth and success, the demand from external customers for fast and easy ways to work with their banking and financial information, as well as the demand from lines of business for support in meeting their customers’ needs, caused an ever-increasing demand for IT development and support. More...

Technology

Enterprise Performance Management

Webinar:
Featuring Hyperion Financial Close Management and Hyperion Disclosure Management. More...

Webinar: Procurement Transformation: Pyramid of Excellence
Featuring Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition(tm) (OBIEE) Procurement Analytics(tm) More...

Webinar:
Driving Organizational Performance through Strategy-Focused Planning More...

Data Governance to Support Enterprise Performance Management
Interview with Phil Sabo, Quest Diagnostics More...

Enterprise to HFM:
Before engaging MarketSphere to assist in an Oracle® Hyperion Financial Management™ (HFM) upgrade, the company used JD Edwards™ as its general ledger and Hyperion Enterprise™ as its current consolidation system. With the new system the company sought to establish an integrated finance environment to support its internal and external corporate reporting requirements. In order to meet these requirements, the company partnered with MarketSphere to develop a Financial Management application that would enable business users to access the company’s financials with more efficiency while also standardizing the delivery and analysis of the company’s financial reports, allowing them to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. More...

Alcoa, Inc.:
Interview with Hank Cochrane, Director of Global Credit Management, Aloca, Inc. More...

Strategic Alignment:
During the initial outreach by new executive leadership, the company realized several issues. First, across its 34 business units, business plans were not strategically aligned, nor were there adequate measurements or a formal system to monitor performance. Furthermore, the overall strategic process was not linked to the budgeting or planning process. In fact, they found that the planning process was manual and required over 4 months to complete. More...

Performance Management:
After developing what was thought to be an answer for enterprise performance management, this company realized the system had several limitations. First, they were not able to successfully build an information repository. The database was too large, creating excessive run-time. Furthermore, during the requirements stage of this project implementation, very little thought or effort was made into access of the database. More...

Scorecarding Success:
This company relies upon nearly 400 vendors to supply the clothes and accessories for its multiple brands. The vendors’ supply chain starts early, using the company’s design for an item to create a sample and determine pricing. Once approved, the vendor is tasked with producing and supplying the item on-time and on-budget. More...

Profitability Analytics:
This organization needed ready access to customer, market, and product data to enable effective analysis and decision making at all levels of the company. Despite its having a high degree of commonality among its systems and data capture, it did not have a single consolidated source for reporting or measuring profitability by customer, product, and market. More...

Enterprise Planning:
This organization’s legacy financial planning and forecasting tools were manually-intensive and offered poor accuracy during “out” quarters. In addition, the system’s long cycle times and dependence on Excel did not permit as much functionality as the company required. In general, the company desired a global forecasting solution that would be more analysis-oriented, versus the legacy system that was more collection-oriented. More...

Driver Based Planning:
This company’s planning process consisted of numerous Excel spreadsheets containing too much detail and little focus on key business drivers. The manual process did not provide transparency into business unit assumptions and required significant effort to consolidate and report the final budget. More...

Implementation Success:
This company was using a manual planning and budgeting system that was inefficient in its production of their annual budget and monthly Performance Management processes. Even more importantly, the system lacked integration with significant Operating and Maintenance (O&M) and capital projects that were the basis for planning and monitoring business activity at the various operating and support business units. More...

HFM and PeopleSoft Integration:
Before engaging MarketSphere to assist in an Oracle® Hyperion Financial Management™ (HFM) upgrade, this company used PeopleSoft Enterprise™ as its general ledger and Hyperion Enterprise™ as its current consolidation system. The company decided to upgrade to HFM since they acquired a company that was using it. With the new system the company sought to establish an integrated finance environment to support its internal and external corporate reporting requirements. More...

Enterprise Performance Management:
This company, like many of their size and complexity, recognized that they had outgrown their financial analysis systems. Their systems included FDC™ Comshare® for Financial Consolidations, Oracle’s® OFA™ for Administrative and Variable budgeting, and an older version of Hyperion® Essbase™ used for profitability models. They were facing a significant investment to update all three components, and determined, for a limited incremental investment, the company could add significant value with new capabilities. More...

Hyperion Planning and Workforce Planning
Operating in 26 States across the country and in Puerto Rico, this healthcare provider serves more than 250,000 patients annually through its network of inpatient rehabilitation hospitals, long-term acute care hospitals, outpatient rehabilitation satellites, and home health agencies. Prior to purchasing Oracle™ Hyperion® technology, the company used a manual, Excel-based set of templates to complete the annual budget and monthly forecasts. More...

Business Intelligence

White Paper: It's Time to Change the Game
This paper showcases an approach currently in use with the largest, and smallest, game changers across the country to maximize business insight: Analytical Assessment Approach (A3). More...

Oracle Business Intelligence Success:
With MarketSphere’s assistance, the company’s business users began to realize the value of reporting and analytics delivered through business intelligence. Formerly siloed departments began to interact, opening lines of communication that focused on data analysis. Previously, meetings were derailed when spreadsheet-driven reports did not match and could not tie out. However, with one universal reporting tool delivering consistent data across user groups, more time was spent analyzing the data rather than attempting to validate its accuracy. More...

Data Governance Impact on ERP Phasing, BI Components and Profitability
Interview with Phil Sabo, Quest Diagnostics More...

Data Relationship Management
Data Relationship Management: Guaranteeing Consistent Financial Results More...

Data Relationship Management at Alcoa, Inc.
Interview with Hank Cochran More...

Data Relationship Management: Guaranteeing Consistent Financial Results
Interview with Lee Beasley, Vice President, Corporate Financial Systems at a Global Financial Services Company More...

GL Reporting & Analytics:
This company was struggling to provide basic financial information across the organization due to multiple transaction sources and disparate reporting systems. The company needed a reporting solution framework that would collect data from multiple ERP systems (QAD and Oracle®) and other data sources to provide management reports with a focus on General Ledger (GL) Reporting and Analytics. Further, the company needed to provide drill-through and an architecture to support a broader solution including credit risk, revenue by customer, and product profitability analytics. More...

Knowledge Management Success:
Due to its size, this company and its executives relied heavily on email and hardcopy review of project proposals to make decisions. In fact, very little formal process was in place and several versions of the truth existed. One specific area of pain was in the review of project proposals to fund IT initiatives. More...

Hyperion Essbase and Data Governance
After experiencing rapid growth and diversification, the company recognized a critical deficiency in its ability to consolidate and report its general ledger data and provide variance to budget and forecast data, despite having a myriad of reporting solutions implemented. Its existing reporting tool was an older version of Oracle® Hyperion Enterprise™. More...

Enterprise Solutions

Financial System Selection and Implementation
Due to its overwhelming growth, this company’s legacy systems for financial accounting, human resources, and agency management were becoming cumbersome -- limiting their reporting, functionality, and integration capabilities. More...

Oracle Solutions

Interview with a Global Financial Services company
Interview with Lee Beasley, Vice President, Corporate Financial Systems, Global Financial Services company More...

Interview with HealthSouth Corporation
Interview with Brannon McDaniel, Vice President, Corporate Systems, HealthSouth Corporation More...

Oracle PeopleSoft:
After years of growth and success, this organization faced both organizational and system challenges. The company had a great legacy brand but the brand had matured as well as operational excellence. Both required rejuvenation to fuel future growth and drive shareholder value. More...

PeopleSoft Financials:
This large insurance broker has posted double-digit annual growth since inception. Stemming from this overwhelming growth rate and integration limitations from the acquisition of an international risk services firm, the company needed to quickly standardize financial processes and improve organizational performance to continue this exceptional business expansion. More...

Improving Organizational Performance:
During a meeting of financial leaders across this company’s three business segments, including tax services, business services and consumer financial services, an executive team vision was defined: “To enable cost effective, proactive customer decision making by providing access to actionable information.” More...

Accounting and Supply Systems Upgrade:
In addition to requiring automated inventory tracking, the company wished to upgrade its legacy accounting and supply chain systems which had prevented it from pursuing growth and expansion plans. More...

Oracle E-Business Suite:
Only a very few startup companies plan for explosive growth in sales; even fewer are actually prepared for it. As a result, the double-edged sword of triple-digit growth forced this company to focus almost exclusively on order fulfillment; meanwhile, back office functions have suffered from neglect. More...

Streamlined and Robust Solution:
Due to business growth, the company’s legacy accounting and supply chain systems were not adequately supporting current operations, let alone any plans for continued growth and expansion. System limitations prohibited all users from utilizing the business system upon request, resulting in only a limited number of users accessing the system at any given point in time. More...

Managed Services

A.S.P.I.R.E by MarketSphere
Application Support for Performance Improvement and Reliable Efficiency More...

Vertex O-Series Implementation Success:
As part of a larger procurement initiative designed to streamline processes and reduce costs, the company identified a need to change their reseller model. Historically, goods were purchased tax exempt, inventoried then resold to individual departments with sales tax. In the new environment, departments would requisition and purchase goods directly with no resale transaction. This required the company to implement a solution that would allow them to accrue use tax when required. More...

Marketing

Strategy & Effectiveness

2009 Marketing ROI & Measurement Study:
The fifth annual research study on marketing ROI and measurements assesses the influence of the economy, marketing operations, marketing practices, and strengths in generating critical insights on delivering marketing effectiveness, efficiency, and growth. More...

Marketing Operations

CMO Agenda: Securing Change and Improving Operational Efficiencies:
Interview with Dr. Robert Shaw, Honorary Professor of Marketing Metrics, Cass School of Business, London More...

White Paper:
A marketing operations department in turn can champion and facilitate a “measurement mindset” within marketing that will help the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) achieve strategic advantage through marketing ROI-based decision-making. This article introduces five ways marketing operations can support and improve marketing measurement capabilities. More...

Putting it All Together:
New marketing priorities, especially the pressure to demonstrate value and return on investment, are shaping the next big evolutions in marketing. At the center of this trend is enterprise marketing management (EMM), a still-evolving term that is most often used when describing the various software suites that attempt to integrate and measure the different functions of marketing. More...

Applications & Technology

Webinar:
Previously held on December 10th, replay the webinar featuring Dr. Robert Shaw, author, professor, and one of the world's top business gurus. More...

The State of Marketing and Role of Technology:
Interview with Dr. Robert Shaw, Honorary Professor of Marketing Metrics, Cass School of Business, London More...

Reducing Campaign Planning and Execution Cycle Time:
The company understood that improved marketing planning, financial management, campaign execution and closed-loop reporting provided a differentiating capability and would best enable marketing to support corporate objectives and the shared vision. However, although marketing’s sound vision was intact, they struggled with many of the challenges experience by most marketers. More...

Marketing Resource Management:
This company was in the throes of integrating a complex set of services, technologies and business channels in the wake of a merger with one of its key competitors. Every four to six weeks, it was launching hundreds of programs around new products and services through as many as 15 unique channels. More...

Marketing Transformation:
Due to its size and sprawling marketing organization, this company has traditionally been challenged to focus and coordinate its campaign-generation business process and ensure low-cost and coordinated message alignment across its various lines of business in multiple regions. As a result, several marketing processes and versions of the truth were in place. More...

Enterprise Marketing Management:
By the late 1990s this company was becoming a victim of its own success. As a leader in its industry, it rapidly expanded its operations internationally as well as its marketing organization to keep pace. By 2005, its creative services operation was aggressively adding headcount to accommodate the ever-increasing needs for printed, web-based and multi-media communications. More...

Industries

Energy

Closing the Information Gap Between Production and Reserves
The oil & gas industry today is challenged by declining reserves and the need to find strategies to counteract this trend. This document examines initiatives that can result in improved management of information supporting production and reserves analysis, with the overall goal of closing the gap between them. More...

Integrated, International Energy Company:
After developing what was thought to be an answer for enterprise performance management, this company realized the system had several limitations. First, they were not able to successfully build an information repository. The database was too large, creating excessive run-time. Furthermore, during the requirements stage of this project implementation, very little thought or effort was made into access of the database. More...

Financial Services

Billion Dollar Brokerage Firm:
This company was evolving and continuing on a rapid growth rate organically and through the completion of multiple acquisitions. The finance organization recognized the need to shift their role within the organization as the business model continued to evolve. In early 2007, core members of the company’s finance groups met to refine their vision. Through multiple work sessions, the outcome focused on an increased emphasis on providing “value-add” to the organization, primarily by providing timely and accurate information. The organization was faced with overcoming a number of challenges in order to realize the stated vision. Challenges ranged from informal policies and procedures to reliance on manual processes which often resulted in inconsistent data. More...

Largest Privately Owned Insurance Broker:
The company deployed an enterprise chart of accounts (COA) and accounting business processes to its international subsidiaries to increase efficiency and enable the enterprise finance departments to better support future business growth and expansion. This deployment positioned the company to take advantage of improved enterprise multicurrency and financial reporting capabilities. More...

One of the Nation's Largest Independent Banks:
Through continued growth and success, the demand from external customers for fast and easy ways to work with their banking and financial information, as well as the demand from lines of business for support in meeting their customers’ needs, caused an ever-increasing demand for IT development and support. This on-going increase in demand, coupled with the organization’s internal struggle to align and commit key stakeholders to a repeatable communications process to capture identified demand, created an opportunity for stronger IT governance. More...

Bank Holding Company:
After experiencing rapid growth and diversification, the company recognized a critical deficiency in its ability to consolidate and report its general ledger data and provide variance to budget and forecast data, despite having a myriad of reporting solutions implemented. More...

Major Insurance Corporation:
Facing several competitive pressures, the subsidiary developed three strategies. First, they wanted to broaden their product offering through the introduction of a lower-priced product with higher margins. Second, they wanted to establish a private label program to increase their distribution base. Third, they wanted to enhance their current market position with a roll-up strategy through a dealer acquisition. More...

Domestic and International Financial Services Provider:
Operating as several autonomous business units, this company had fully decentralized and redundant sourcing, procurement, contract management, and accounts payable functions. In addition, the processes supporting these functions were inconsistent across business units, as well as completely paper-based and manually intensive. More...

Health Care

Nation's Largest Provider of Inpatient Rehabilitation Services:
Prior to purchasing Oracle™ Hyperion® technology, the company used a manual, Excel-based set of templates to complete the annual budget and monthly forecasts. More...

Largest For-Profit Hospital Owner and Operator:
As enterprises are subject to the unclaimed property regulations of each state, this organization found itself reporting to approximately 20 different jurisdictions. Further, due to a lack of consolidation, it was filing separately for each legal entity, resulting in nearly 600 unclaimed property reports each year. In addition, the organization did not have automated processes for data collection, consolidation, and reconciliation, making the reporting effort even more burdensome. More...

Life Sciences

Pharmaceutical Services Company:
The company originally implemented Oracle® PeopleSoft Enterprise™ but realized shortly after implementation that they needed to address additional business process improvements to support acquisition growth. The company continued to expand its overall portfolio and offerings by strategically acquiring companies that fit its services. The most recent acquisition was the purchase of two divisions of another drug discovery and development company which was required to be off its legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system within a matter of months. More...

Large Pharmaceutical Manufacturer:
Due to business growth, the company’s legacy accounting and supply chain systems were not adequately supporting current operations, let alone any plans for continued growth and expansion. System limitations prohibited all users from utilizing the business system upon request, resulting in only a limited number of users accessing the system at any given point in time. More...

Manufacturing

Major Manufacturer:
Exceeding customer expectations by providing superior products and customer service is a long-standing core value of this manufacturing company. However, company leadership recently recognized that repeat customer business had significantly decreased over the last few years. After soliciting former customers to find out why they had taken their business elsewhere, the company discovered that more than two-thirds left due to poor customer service. To correct this problem and reclaim the company’s reputation as #1 in customer service, the executive leadership team commenced a subset of their direct reports (the senior leadership team) to take on the realization of this goal and commissioned MarketSphere to provide project management and subject-matter expertise. As the overall goal would require several years to achieve, the chief objective of this six (6) month assessment effort was to identify the steps necessary to transform the company culture to one that values customer satisfaction as king. More...

$27 Billion Manufacturer:
This organization needed ready access to customer, market, and product data to enable effective analysis and decision making at all levels of the company. Despite its having a high degree of commonality among its systems and data capture, it did not have a single consolidated source for reporting or measuring profitability by customer, product, and market. Instead, it relied upon emailed requests for data and manual compilation to generate basic revenue and volume information. More...

World's Leader in Production and Management of Primary Aluminum:
This organization’s legacy financial planning and forecasting tools were manually-intensive and offered poor accuracy during “out” quarters. In addition, the system’s long cycle times and dependence on Excel did not permit as much functionality as the company required. In general, the company desired a global forecasting solution that would be more analysis-oriented, versus the legacy system that was more collection-oriented. More...

World-Class Manufacturer:
Two years ago, this company completed their first costing project that helped in making assessments of whether to make or buy technology and products. The first phase costing project also helped to normalize plant standards and develop an internal view of fixed costs versus variable costs. In addition, it allowed the company to appropriately recognize overhead costs. More...

Retail

Online Retailer:
Only a very few startup companies plan for explosive growth in sales; even fewer are actually prepared for it. As a result, the double-edged sword of triple-digit growth forced this company to focus almost exclusively on order fulfillment; meanwhile, back office functions have suffered from neglect. More...

Global Retailer:
Due to its size and sprawling marketing organization, this company has traditionally been challenged to focus and coordinate its campaign-generation business process and ensure low-cost and coordinated message alignment across its various lines of business in multiple regions. As a result, several marketing processes and versions of the truth were in place. More...

World's Largest Casual-Dining Chain:
Although its parent company will help transform and re-energize the organization’s financial health, the company realized it must create a goal of returning to positive system-wide same-store sales growth over time. Concurrently, the company wanted to leverage its core strength- its ‘market know-how’- that had previously been under utilized in business planning and operations. However, the company did not document their business planning efforts, nor were these efforts aligned across departments. More...

$3 Billion Retailer of Casual Clothing and Accessories:
This company relies upon nearly 400 vendors to supply the clothes and accessories for its multiple brands. The vendors’ supply chain starts early, using the company’s design for an item to create a sample and determine pricing. Once approved, the vendor is tasked with producing and supplying the item on-time and on-budget. The vendor’s accountability becomes even more important when an item is especially popular, as it must be reproduced and delivered to stores quickly. More...

Transportation

Largest Global Transportation Services Company:
Before engaging MarketSphere to assist in an Oracle® Hyperion Financial Management™ (HFM) upgrade, this company used PeopleSoft Enterprise™ as its general ledger and Hyperion Enterprise™ as its current consolidation system. The company decided to upgrade to HFM since they acquired a company that was using it. With the new system the company sought to establish an integrated finance environment to support its internal and external corporate reporting requirements. More...

Utilities

One-Stop Shop Telecommunications Company:
Before engaging MarketSphere to assist in an Oracle® Hyperion Financial Management™ (HFM) upgrade, the company used JD Edwards™ as its general ledger and Hyperion Enterprise™ as its current consolidation system. With the new system the company sought to establish an integrated finance environment to support its internal and external corporate reporting requirements. In order to meet these requirements, the company partnered with MarketSphere to develop a Financial Management application that would enable business users to access the company’s financials with more efficiency while also standardizing the delivery and analysis of the company’s financial reports, allowing them to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. More...

Multi-Billion Dollar Diversifed Energy Company:
This company was using a manual planning and budgeting system that was inefficient in its production of their annual budget and monthly Performance Management processes. Even more importantly, the system lacked integration with significant Operating and Maintenance (O&M) and capital projects that were the basis for planning and monitoring business activity at the various operating and support business units. More...

Nation's Largest Investor-Owned Electric Gas Utilities:
The month-end close cycle for this $7.5B organization takes approximately seven to 10 days to close the ledger system, two days to load the general ledger (GL) information into their Management Reporting system, and another three to five days to analyze and report financial results. Compared to world-class organizations, it was apparent that the company had an opportunity to accelerate the cycle time and improve the finalization of month end data. More...