McCormick Macnaughton (MCMN) is an Irish family-owned business, established approximately 75 years ago. Headquartered in Dublin, McCormick Macnaughton Limited is the sole distributor of CATERPILLAR Construction Equipment, Marine, and Power Generation products for Ireland. In addition to Caterpillar, McCormick Macnaughton is also the supplier of GOODYEAR Earthmoving Tyres and is the sole supplier of YOKOHOMA High Performance Car, truck, bus and Earthmoving Tyres. The group has a 32-county branch and distributor network supplying and servicing a wide customer base.
In 2005, Aidan Cronin, Finance Director at MCMN, embarked on a project to streamline management reporting within the group. Aidan explains how the project came about.
“Due to the disparate nature of our businesses, we have multiple ERP/GL products in use across the group. While each system supports its part of the business well, at group level we found ourselves increasingly dependent on manual processes and a complex set of spreadsheets to produce our group monthly management accounts”.
Ciall met with the Group Finance function to present the Microsoft solution, Enterprise Reporting, as an alternative to spreadsheets. During the proof of concept stage, it was vital to demonstrate that the ER solution could cope with data sourced from multiple GL’s, using very different coding structures, charts of accounts etc.
Fiona Keating, Management Accountant at MCMN was the main internal resource working on the ER implementation. “One of the objectives of this project was to introduce ‘reporting standards’ across all group companies. To that end, we had to design a mapping and conversion process to transform the raw data from our 5 GL’s into one standard format for consolidation purposes. This in turn required us to carry out a substantial review and tidy up of existing data/structures before building our ER suite of reports”.
Asked about the impact of the project, Aidan commented that since go live, the real gains have been clarity and consistency of information across the business. Due to the implementation of ER, reporting timelines have also been tightened and many of the spreadsheets previously being used have now been eliminated.
Fiona has also seen real gains e.g. intercompany reporting has changed from a cumbersome into an efficient process. ER has also been rolled out beyond the group finance function to individual Business Unit Managers. They can now run their own reports and analysis, all sourced from one data repository. “In summary we no longer have multiple versions of numbers – rather everyone is working from clear standardised formats”.
