Win story in focus: A UK-based multinational energy corporation
About
A UK-based multinational energy corporation headquartered in London, operating across oil, gas and renewable energy and is one of the world’s largest energy firms, has presence in over 70 countries with more than 85,000 employees, spanning the full value chain from exploration and production to refining, petrochemicals, power generation, trading and marketing.
Problem
This multinational energy corporation’s global finance ecosystem supports license to operate activities across more than 70 countries and over 1,000 legal entities, requiring highly accurate, resilient and timely processes at scale for consolidation, reporting, tax and external disclosures.
The legacy Report One (R1) consolidation platform had become a material risk due to an ageing and tightly coupled technology nearing the end of life that could not reliably support the corporation’s scale. At the same time, they successfully implemented Central Finance (cFIN) as the single source of financial truth, significantly increasing data granularity and volume. However, the legacy consolidation platform was unable to support these demands.
- The platform could no longer scale with business growth or meet increasing data volumes, regulatory demands and future reporting needs, as stability and support declined and cost and risk increased.
- Limited and scattered visibility of data within the Enterprise Finance Data Model (EFDM).
- It could not support real time or near real time consolidation, nor provide transparent drill through from consolidated results to source transactions.
- Challenges in managing the vast scale of companies and data distributed across 5,000+ intercompany relationships, along with growing intercompany complexity and reporting scenarios.
Solution
This was one of the largest and most complex SAP finance programmes globally, covering more than 70 countries, over 1,500 legal entities and 100+ business units. It supported more than 10,000 finance users, processed over 50 million journal entries annually, operated across 100+ currencies, managed more than 5,000 intercompany relationships and handled over 40 consolidation scenarios across multiple reporting streams.
- Single global consolidation and reporting platform: Implemented SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting (S4GR) embedded on S/4HANA Central Finance (cFIN) as the single, authoritative global platform for group consolidation and reporting.
- Complete functional and technical replacement of Report One: Delivered a future proof, SAP native solution aligned to the corporation’s long term Finance Digital Core (FDC) strategy, while eliminating key R1 risks, including scalability constraints, stability issues and end of life technology concerns.
- Real time financial consolidation: Moved from batch based consolidation to near real time processing, enabling on demand consolidated results that can be refreshed multiple times during the close and analysed immediately without relying on overnight or period end batches.
- End to end integrated finance architecture: Delivered seamless, automated data flow across the finance landscape from source systems through Central Finance to S/4HANA Group Reporting, eliminating data duplication and manual handoffs across systems.
- EFDM aligned enterprise data model: Implemented an Enterprise Finance Data Model (EFDM) aligned design with standardised finance dimensions, including entity, profit centre, segment, partner and currency.
- End to end finance process enablement: The solution supports a comprehensive set of business-critical finance processes, including Group Consolidation, Local Statutory Reporting, Group and Finance Management Information and intercompany reconciliation and elimination.
Impact
The multinational energy corporation evolved from a fragmented, risk prone, legacy consolidation landscape to a future ready, real time, highly automated and audit ready global finance platform, establishing a new benchmark for enterprise-scale finance transformation.
- Faster, more predictable close: Achieved a 30–40 percent reduction in close duration, removing multiple days from quarter end and year end closes, and improving close predictability through automated workflows and real time data availability.
- Material reduction in manual effort: 80–90 percent automation in intercompany matching and reconciliation.
Reduced manual journal postings by approximately 50 percent by implementing standardised processes, automated eliminations and integrated data flows. - Exceptional data quality and accuracy: Achieved 99.99 percent reconciliation accuracy at go live, while significantly reducing reconciliation breaks and post close adjustments.
- Full transparency and audit readiness: Enabled real time drill through from group consolidated balances to entity, document and transaction levels, strengthening the control environment and audit confidence through complete data lineage.
Anne Greenwald
