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sap solution Brief
SAP BusinessObjects
Sector: utilities
Electrabel accelerates intercompany reconciliation to speed up financial closes
proFile
Electrabel, a member of GDF SUEZ Benelux &
Germany, is the biggest energy supplier in the
Benelux region. The company produces and
supplies energy and delivers innovative energy
solutions and personal services to 6 million
consumers and commercial and industrial
customers. Electrabel has a diversified Benelux
production park, with a total capacity of 16,000
MW. It includes facilities that operate with
renewable energy sources as well as
conventional and nuclear power plants.
reQuiremenTs
• Solution to speed up the financial close
• User-friendly tool
• Allow intercompany reconciliation at the
document level
soluTion
SAP BusinessObjects Intercompany
Reconciliation 10.0
BeneFiTs
• Shortens the time to close the books
• Reduced operating costs
• Lower error rate
Quick Facts
The number of transactions between the affiliate companies of
world energy leader GDF Suez is enormous. With so many
intercompany documents to be treated, intercompany
reconciliations have long held up the closing processes at Belgian
energy provider Electrabel, a member of the GDF Suez group. As
long-time user of ERP applications from SAP, Electrabel recently
installed SAP® BusinessObjects™ Intercompany Reconciliation
(ICS) to manage its reconciliation processes. The operational
departments now reconcile intercompany documents daily, at the
document level, thus improving the speed, quality and reliability of
the end-of-month financial close.
“Our closing process has been a challenge for
years,” admitted Nadine Dekeyser, Process
Management FICO. “When in 2010 the GDF
Suez Group decided to drastically reduce its
consolidation process, Electrabel had to review
its entire closing cycle.” An SAP user for fifteen
years already, Electrabel asked its trusted ERP
partner for advice. The SAP Business
Transformation Services analyzed the
processes, identified Electrabel’s needs and
worked out a new approach.
Time-consuming inTercompany
reconciliaTions
“One of the conclusions was that intercompany
reconciliations caused real bottlenecks in our
accounting cycle,” said Dekeyser. “We knew it
was time-consuming to collect the intercom-
pany invoices and postings, check them all,
reconcile intercompany transactions and
correct errors.” SAP recommended installing a
daily instead of a month-end reconciliation
process, moving the responsibility from the
monitor all the data. All the closing team has to
do, at the end of the month, is to look at the
balances and any issues in the closing reports.”
real-Time version oF The TruTh
"Each document is reconciled once and for all,
so that no rework is required in the next closing
period," Dekeyser added. “The central inter-
company reconciliation database ensures that
everyone works with one version of the finan-
cial truth.” Right now, Electrabel is using SAP
ICS to reconcile the documents of 19 organiza-
tions. They hope to increase that number very
soon, reaping even more ROI from their invest-
ment. “Our only difficulty during the implemen-
tation was programming the extraction of
transactional data from the SAP system,"
Nadine Dekeyser concluded. SAP Intercom-
pany Reconciliation 10.0 now includes a stan-
dard extraction package, which makes it really
easy to kick-start process automation and to
accelerate intercompany reconciliations.
access to the developers,” Gouvy recalled.
“They really listened to our needs and resolved
issues quickly. It was a win-win: we could
impact the development, while SAP received
valuable feedback on the product. By the way,
the reactivity of SAP has been excellent in
every phase of the project.”
speedy reconciliaTion
Electrabel has been working with ICS for half a
year now, after exhaustive testing. The familiar
interface made user buy-in easy.
Raeckelboom: “While reconciliation happened
in Excel, in the past, with lots of manual
processing involved, the new tool shortens the
process significantly. Every day, the IS team
uploads all the new intercompany documents
created by the A/R and A/P. Whenever possi-
ble, the documents are reconciled automati-
cally. Only the ones that stay open because
they cause a difference, are processed manu-
ally. The daily reconciliation allows us to easily
closing team to the operating departments
(Accounts Payable (A/P), Accounts Receivable
(A/R)) and implement SAP ICS.
The win-win oF sap’s ramp-up
program
Electrabel assembled a team of SAP users to
evaluate, configure and implement the applica-
tion, along with the Information Services (IS)
team and SAP. Ruben Raeckelboom, team lea-
der Closing and Tax, and Nancy Gouvy, Lead
Process Management FICO, were involved:
“The info session/demo at SAP proved that
SAP ICS is user-friendly and powerful. Moreo-
ver, it belongs to the same suite as our consoli-
dation tool, so it uses the same metadata and
we are familiar with the approach, which made
it easy to configure the tool.” As the 7.5 version
of SAP ICS could not meet the requirements
for document-based reconciliation, SAP invited
Electrabel to participate in the Ramp-Up
Program for the 10.0 upgrade. “We got direct
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www.sap.com/belux/contactsap
“Each document is reconciled once and for all, so that
no rework is required in the next closing period. The cen-
tral intercompany reconciliation database ensures that
everyone works with one version of the financial truth.”
Nadine Dekeyser, Process Management FICO, Electrabel
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