Customers

Sartorius


"Without BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation, redirecting The Sartorius Group and its finances within today's complex environment would have been much more difficult. In addition, the Business Objects solution accelerates the closing process and ensures that we deliver high-quality, up-to-date management reports."

Jörg Pfirrmann, Vice President Group Controlling, Sartorius AG

Challenge

The Sartorius Group, based in Göttingen, Germany, is a leading, internationally known laboratory and process technology provider covering the biotechnology and mechatronics sectors. With €484.3 million in revenue in 2005 and 3,600 employees, Sartorius maintains production facilities in Europe, Asia, and America, and a presence in 110 countries.

Rapid growth resulted in an increasingly complex business, leading Sartorius to implement a new organizational structure. "From 1998 to 2001, the Sartorius Group strongly expanded its business activities on a global scale, partly through acquisitions and partly by rapid organic growth," explains Jörg Pfirrmann, VP of group controlling at Sartorius. The company’s reporting capabilities had to represent the new multidimensional structure, while providing results more quickly to meet the financial market’s reporting deadlines and transparency demands. To effectively support these profound changes, Sartorius needed to replace the existing software setup with a comprehensive financial control solution, and one that would support IFRS and local GAAP standards.

The company’s previous approach of working with Excel spreadsheets wasn’t appropriate for the larger and more complex organization. "We were looking for a financial software solution that would take our new structure into account," says Pfirrmann. "In order to comply with reporting deadlines fixed externally, the key figures and information required had to be made available ever faster," adds Gerrit Behncke, controller and administrator, group controlling at Sartorius.

Approach

To address the requirements, Sartorius sought a solution that would enable harmonized internal and external reporting. This meant replacing legacy software with a powerful and integrated solution that could report financial figures according to local and Group accounting standards, in a single software application. The software had to include a uniform, multidimensional database and be user-friendly and flexible.

Sartorius chose the BusinessObjects™ Financial Consolidation application for management reporting, financial consolidation, risk management, and the BusinessObjects Intercompany application for real-time intercompany reconciliation. BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation allows the Sartorius team to quickly and accurately assess and report on the financial state of the business. Additionally, BusinessObjects Intercompany utilizes the power and speed of the Web to reconcile intercompany balances in real-time and centralize company management accounts and currencies.

"Although our overall reporting process is more complex, the Business Objects solution makes reporting easier, faster, and more transparent," says Pfirrmann. The quality and consistency of the financial data allows optimization and acceleration of the controllers’ jobs. The centrally administered, Web-based solution also increases flexibility and efficiency.

Results

BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation facilitates efficient controlling for Sartorius. Using the solutions from Business Objects, an SAP company, the Sartorius financial team easily addressed its challenges while streamlining financial consolidation and management reporting based on higher-quality financial data. "Without BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation, redirecting The Sartorius Group and its finances within today's complex environment would have been much more difficult. In addition, the Business Objects solution accelerates the closing process and ensures that we deliver high-quality, up-to-date management reports," says Pfirrmann.

Today, about 100 users at 40 Sartorius sites use BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation for reporting. "Previously, the team dealt with status report retrieval, data copying and linking and error identification. Today, the software does all this," states Marco Hahn, controller and administrator, group controlling at Sartorius. Throughout the entire reporting cycle, BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation eliminates potential errors early in the process through automated controls.

Using BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation for reporting, consolidation, and risk management, and BusinessObjects Intercompany for real-time reconciliation of intercompany balances, Sartorius now enjoys a faster workflow and increased efficiency due to central administration. "Business Objects accelerated the closing process, saving time while increasing data quality," says Pfirrmann. The automated solution has also resulted in significant reduction of time-consuming data quality checks. "We now want to optimize the Excel packages that we have developed ourselves and still use, or else implement more high-performance solutions," says Pfirrmann. In this context, Sartorius is considering extending its BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation application by introducing BusinessObjects Extended Analytics as a front-end tool for dynamic data preparation and report drafting.

"With BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation, data is processed more quickly and transparently. The result is better-informed executive decisions and a sounder strategic direction. The finance department can thus contribute more to the company’s success," concludes Hahn.

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