European mobile communications retailer invests in software for new approach to financial management, planning systems
Santa Clara, CA — August 30, 2005 — Carphone Warehouse, Europe's leading independent mobile communications retailer, said it expects to greatly improve its approach to planning, budgeting and financial reporting by investing in technology solutions from Hyperion, a provider of business performance management software.
"As a new generation retailer, we aim to exceed our customer's expectations by providing an innovative approach to service," said Nigel Langstaff, group director of Finance at Carphone Warehouse. "To stay at the front of this dynamic and rapidly moving industry, we constantly develop new ideas and services for our customers."
Langstaff went on to say that Carphone Warehouse realized it needed to apply a similarly innovative approach to its financial management and planning systems. "Hyperion offers us the best way to do this by providing a truly integrated approach," he said.
Carphone Warehouse purchased Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Master Data Management Server. Around 200 users will have access to the use of this software.
Carphone Warehouse was already a Hyperion Essbase customer and has increased the number of users from 32 to nearly 200. Hyperion Essbase allows for centralized maintenance of dimensions, hierarchies, calculations and business rules. Carphone Warehouse intends to now expand its usage of Hyperion Essbase to create a unified analytical platform.
As part of the Hyperion business performance management offering, Carphone Warehouse will also use Hyperion Planning, a centralized, Web-based solution, to track and monitor business plans and forecasts, translating strategic objectives into operational goals and targets.
"For financial planning, we had previously used Microsoft Excel," said Langstaff. "With Hyperion Planning we now have the ability to more easily generate rolling forecasts. It will be a big improvement over our manually intensive use of spreadsheets."
Hyperion Financial Management, a Web-based application for financial consolidation and reporting, is owned and maintained by Carphone Warehouse's group finance team. By using Hyperion's software, Carphone Warehouse said it intends to improve its financial close and reporting process and reduce internal control risk.
Carphone Warehouse said finance personnel should be able to spend less time on processing and more time on value-added analysis, as well as providing a single version of the truth to support financial management and statutory reporting.
"Hyperion Financial Management will give us a far greater degree of integrity and will help us significantly improve our approach to reporting at both a group level and business unit level," said Langstaff.
The final component of Carphone Warehouse's purchase is the Hyperion Master Data Management (MDM) Server. Using the Hyperion MDM Server, Carphone Warehouse finance personnel can be directly involved in the iterative process of managing complex, changing business performance management master data, rather than having IT manage this for them.
Hyperion MDM Server then synchronizes master data across analytic applications, data warehouses, transaction systems and business performance management applications. Hyperion MDM Server integrates with the Hyperion Business Intelligence Platform.
"The key benefit we expect to gain is a single version of the truth in terms of financial management, reporting, planning, budgeting and data management. We believe we will gain significant process efficiencies as a result of investing in Hyperion software," commented Langstaff.
