A global IT company
Telecommunications, media, and technology (TMT)
Digitally transform the record-to-report (R2R) process and reduce time required by five days
Workiva and SAP S/4HANA
with internal stakeholders and the investment community
in close and reporting time
Client’s reputation enhanced through faster, technology-driven reporting
of R2R process by five days
New, automated reporting process
and insight into factors affecting quarterly numbers
Click on each part of the journey to learn more about our client’s transformation.
Looking for the “one way” forward after acquisition-fueled growth.
Albertsons is committed to “one way.” Meaning that, as large as the company becomes, it aims to remain unified in its vision and in the systems and tools that support it.
Acquisition-fueled growth naturally opens the door to “many ways.” By 2019, different divisions and subsidiaries had their own back-office solutions. People, processes, and data were becoming more siloed.
A different kind of company might have assumed that decentralized processes are an acceptable consequence of multiple acquisitions. Or that you can’t be one of the biggest industry players and move with startling speed and agility when it comes to acquisitions. But accepting trade-offs like those is not the Albertsons way.
Company-wide opportunities
Finance Opportunities
HR Opportunities
290,000+ Albertsons employees come together every day in the cloud.
Today, cashiers at 2,200 stores all log their hours via the same mobile app. That data flows seamlessly to payroll, and across the enterprise-- where it’s available for everyone from store managers making data-driven staffing projections to CFOs reviewing budgets.
Back-office staff spend less time on manual processes and more on analyzing data in ways that help lower costs and improve performance every day, and inform due diligence during acquisitions.
HR executives and business managers find it easy to access candidate information, share observations and schedule interviews, quickly and easily moving the right candidates through the hiring process.
And candidates who become new hires, continue through the same efficient, cloud-based environment as they complete onboarding and get to work—already a part of Albertsons’ “one way.”
Company-wide success
Finance Successes
HR Successes
Making sure the “one way” continues to be the best way.
Long before the go-live date, Albertsons was collaborating with Oracle and KPMG about future initiatives. They wanted to know what to expect from upcoming product releases and how they should be planning to leverage new functionality.
The company’s agile mindset combined with its investment in Oracle Cloud and KPMG Powered Enterprise will keep it in a position to continue evolving, always finding the best way forward as one, strong enterprise.
Finance Vision
HR Vision
We worked with our client to gain the perspective that looking at the close was not only about producing accurate numbers about the business, but also supporting all functions to engage around what those numbers mean to the business. The real value occurs when you use technology to support your discussion of the story behind the numbers—the factors and conditions that are affecting your business.
– Ralph Canter, KPMG Managing Director, Finance Transformation
Click on a phase to scroll down to its description.
Reimagining Reporting
Understanding how financial reporting could be improved meant understanding how the current process had evolved as well as the culture behind it. Most of the company’s business comes from selling PCs and other hardware—categories that have existed for decades. And many of the financial professionals involved in reporting are long-term employees accustomed to working within an established (if unwieldy) system that consistently produced strong reports. Finally, it’s worth noting that achieving consensus among teams and managers had always been a key element in the company’s organizational culture.
All of this meant that persuading the finance department to embrace change wasn’t easy. But once our KPMG team had demonstrated an in-depth grasp of the background, work processes, and technology used for reporting, we began to gain greater acceptance for a new approach. Only after this essential buy-in was achieved did we explain how to leverage the cloud-based technology they already owned from SAP and Workiva to execute the work. Key steps included:
Making the most of a dedicated, experienced financial team
Early in the engagement, the client asked our team to document the current R2R process since little formal documentation existed within the company. Each participant had their own set of rules, systems, and procedures, but a full perspective on how the entire process worked was hard to pin down. In a matter of weeks, we were able to show the client the reality of the multiple inputs, data challenges, and constant revision that went into each report. Yes, the final output was still on time and accurate, but the method for getting there was labor-intensive, requiring the finance department to work longer and harder than necessary. To address these issues and identify better alternatives we began by:
Saving time where it matters most
While the upgrade to SAP’s S/4HANA platform delivered company-wide efficiencies, it had little impact on the later stages of the reporting process. One reason was that two sets of reports were developed simultaneously for different constituents: purely fact-based quantitative external reporting for shareholders and regulators and more qualitative reports used by management to explain quarterly results. The process for creating these reports was only partially automated through older techniques that required extensive human inputs. To replace this, KPMG made changes to Workiva’s reporting software that allowed it to access data from a single, validated source and generate fully automated reports. Other improvements included:
Building the processes needed to support a modern, digital platform
Implementing a full digital transformation instead of spot fixes for individual problems was a key factor in shortening the R2R process by five days. Quarterly and monthly reports are already being created on this new schedule, with fiscal year-end reporting set to follow. Other benefits being realized include:
From fixers to futurists – Spending less time ensuring data
Helping the client make the most of technology from Workiva and SAP was an accomplishment in itself. But the bigger achievement was changing their perspective on how to manage the R2R process and expanding its value within the organization. Historically, R2R participants found themselves spending too much time focused on double- and triple-checking numbers, seeking out bad data, or working around anomalies in the system. But as reporting grows faster and more automated, it promises to make information more available and relevant—not just on a monthly or quarterly basis but continuously. By building on this foundation, finance departments can look ahead to providing forward-looking strategic information and analysis to a wider range of end users inside and outside the organization.
Workiva is a cloud-based platform that helps more than 4,300 companies worldwide simplify the process of managing and reporting financial data. KPMG has been an alliance partner with Workiva since 2019. Our client was already using Workiva to support quarterly reporting, but our team helped to customize the system for added functionality and speed.
Let’s talk about where you are now and your goals for the future.
