Nidec Leroy-Somer Saves Over 100 Hours Per Month With Wands for Oracle

• Time savings of over 100 hours in month-end report processing.

• Nontechnical staff members can easily build and edit reports from different offices and manufacturing sites with Wands for Oracle.

• Automatic report distribution gives the finance team more time for valuable analysis.

• Access to EBS data in real time with the ability to drill down at the lowest levels.

The finance team at Nidec Leroy-Somer, one of the oldest and most respected brands in the motor industry, needed an improved solution for month-end close. The team was frustrated with time-consuming report edits and overtime work hours. Finance leaders sought a comprehensive solution that worked seamlessly with the Oracle E-Business Suite and allowed for flexible, streamlined reporting. With Wands for Oracle from insightsoftware, the company achieved welcome time savings from automated reporting, easier report editing, and flexible drill-down capabilities. Nidec Leroy-Somer has a rich history of exceptional product reliability and performance since 1909. Today, the brand is recognized worldwide as the mark of technological innovation and energy efficiency in industrial motors and power electronics.

Struggling With Inflexible Reports

As a well-established brand, Nidec Leroy-Somer prides itself on its reliability, and the organization’s finance department is no exception. Using Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) for its data management, Nidec Leroy-Somer previously used the ERP’s Financial Statement Generator (FSG) for financial reporting. Although the system had standard month-end reporting features out of the box, the organization found it needed more flexibility. Not only were existing processes time consuming, but when a member of the finance team needed to update or correct a report, they had no way to make the change using FSG without technical support. “It was very stressful at month-end close,” recalled Carol Cepeda, Finance Project Manager at Nidec Leroy-Somer. “If you had a trial balance, we had to map it to other tools. If a new account was created, you had to go back and find what the missing value was. If it wasn’t within a range, you had to go back and investigate.” Because changing the reports was so complex, making necessary edits took hours during month-end close. To cut down on the time it took to generate reports, increase flexibility, and improve work-life balance for the teams, Nidec set out to find a comprehensive reporting solution that worked seamlessly with Oracle EBS.

Introducing Wands for Oracle

When Carol sought to find a new reporting tool, she didn’t have to search far–members of Nidec’s finance team had worked with Wands for Oracle in the past. After requesting a demo, Carol immediately saw its value. “The demo sold itself,” Carol said. “It was an easy tool and user-friendly, allowing us to do everything within Excel. For Finance users, that’s a big plus.” [customer_testimonial] Wands for Oracle provided Nidec’s finance team with:

• Time savings from automated, refreshable reporting

• Greater autonomy for the finance team to generate and edit reports

• Drill-down capabilities

• Real-time data from Oracle EBS

Once Nidec implemented Wands for Oracle, the organization hosted user training to get the finance team up to speed. The team found the switchover relatively easy, because users could leverage existing Excel skills. “It’s intuitive,” Carol said. “I conducted training for all users. We took the time to learn the tool and quickly found how user-friendly it is.”

Faster, More Intuitive Reporting

Wands for Oracle provided Nidec with the independence and functionality the organization sorely needed with the flexibility and autonomy for its finance team to generate and edit its own reports– leading to significant time savings. “We got recent feedback from one user who said she used to take half a day to tie out sales because she’d have to extract data from other places,” Carol said. “Now, with Wands, she can do it within an hour or two.” Working with live data in Oracle has been a game-changer for Carol’s team. With Nidec’s previous system, it took two hours just to extract data from Oracle EBS. Now, the information loads into reports instantly. With 100 users across 15 entities each saving hours of data extraction time, Nidec saves over 100 hours per month on reporting. “At month-end, if anything seems off, you can go into the system, make the change, refresh, and you can see the impact right away,” Carol said. “In the past, if you needed to extract data, you had to download the information again and reformat.”

Beyond the General Ledger

When Nidec first implemented Wands, the organization began with its GL Wand feature, which allows the finance team to build out reports using general ledger balances in the familiar Excel interface. But because the staff needed to take data from aspects of the business outside of the general ledger, the organization also adopted Reports Wand. Reports Wand allows staff members to take on operational reporting and analysis, as well as develop queries in-house. With Reports Wand, Nidec can now report from different manufacturing sites, giving the organization greater connectivity and ease of reporting from any location.

Stress-Free Report Distribution

Nidec has also automated the report distribution process with Wands’ Distribution Manager feature. With Distribution Manager, Nidec can “set it and forget it” with reports, allowing the organization to generate and send reports to the right people on a set schedule. The feature also allows Nidec to easily send reports to different entities, which improves its audit and compliance readiness. “Before Wands, we were manually sending information,” said Carol. “For audit purposes, we’re required to send reports to different entities. Before Wands, someone would have to download the report, fill the data in manually, and then send it. It’s a much faster process now. You just refresh and the data is there.” Ready to learn more? Watch our video on how to future-proof your Oracle strategy.