Accelerating and streamlining financial closing processes through fast close
Context
TIBCO, a digital services provider, is a rapidly growing group with €140 million in revenue in 2020 and more than 1,600 employees.
The company supports the digital systems of businesses and telecom operators by ensuring prevention, maintenance, and evolution of their infrastructures.
Their missions include:
- Developing networks and infrastructures
- Managing, protecting, and maintaining existing IT systems and networks
- Digitizing production processes for client services
- Providing Digital Workplace support to users
Challenges
TIBCO called on Talan to implement a flexible and agile solution capable of improving and accelerating the monthly financial closing process.
The objective of fast close is to obtain a consolidated forecast view of the monthly closing situation. At the time, TIBCO’s accounting close process could take up to D+26.
By implementing a dedicated acceleration tool, TIBCO aimed to achieve forecast visibility by D+6, with a long-term target of D+3, enabling faster analysis and accelerating internal decision-making.
Beyond these objectives, the selected solution also needed to meet the following requirements:
- Integration with Power BI
- Ability to use predictive functions powered by Microsoft Azure AI
- Autonomous data manipulation through Excel/Web interfaces
- A flexible, user-configurable, and scalable solution
Methods and Solutions
TIBCO chose to rely on Jedox and partnered with Talan to implement the Fast Close solution within Jedox.
Jedox is a Cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution built on multidimensional technology. Its intuitive unified platform enables rapid user adoption.
TIBCO companies manage their activities by project. Their accounting close process requires visibility by legal entity and by project, with more than 40,000 active projects to manage.
The implementation of automated and standardized management rules based on project typology and expense categories significantly accelerated detailed project analysis.
A full-cost project view was simplified thanks to indirect cost allocation features natively available in Jedox, allowing efficient data distribution.
Jedox’s flexibility also enabled simplified management of specific business requirements.
The project was delivered by expert consultants using a semi-agile methodology, combining an upstream requirements gathering phase with sprint-based development cycles and close collaboration with business teams.
To facilitate integration between Jedox and Power BI, already used by TIBCO for data visualization, the OData (Open Data Protocol) connector was implemented to streamline data sharing. Power BI could therefore easily access and retrieve processed and consolidated forecast closing data from Jedox, enabling TIBCO teams to build dashboards and reporting directly within Power BI.
Benefits
- Significant time savings with forecast visibility available by D+6 instead of D+26
- Review and harmonization of processes and management rules, helping identify internal improvement opportunities
- Rapid identification of inconsistencies through automated alerts
Strong support for external growth initiatives: when TIBCO integrates a new company into its ERP, it can immediately adopt the same acceleration process through a standardized model shared across all TIBCO entities integrated into the same ERP system.