John Swire & Sons
About John Swire & Sons
John Swire & Sons is headquartered in Sydney and a wholly-owned subsidiary of John Swire & Sons Ltd. After the Second World War, Swire's trade with Australia prospered on the back of regular passenger and cargo liner services. Today, Swire's interests in Australia focus on cold storage, refrigerated distribution services, road transportation, materials handling, arable and livestock farming and liner shipping services. Swire has invested substantially in rural properties in New South Wales and Queensland, where it produces four key commodities: cotton, wool, beef and wheat.
Background
Consolidation of financial results of disparate group companies was a slow and laborious process relying on Excel. This meant consolidation was only carried out annually for statutory purposes. The group required more timely consolidated information to support its own management and external stakeholders.
The Project
John Swire & Sons engaged Taysols to assist with the design, build, and deployment of Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and Financial Data Management (FDM). FDM was used to map various general ledgers to the group chart of accounts and to load as well as validate monthly actuals. HFM took care of intercompany eliminations, FX translations, cash flows and the reporting of three statements for statutory and management purposes. Group consolidations are now carried out monthly with reports readily available to a wide range of users.
The Approach
The approach taken was a consultative one. John Swire personnel partnered with Taysols consultants and worked together through accounting and system challenges and the difficulties associated with migrating from a spreadsheet environment. This approach allowed Swire project team members to learn the ins and outs of the new consolidation solution and therefore enabled them to maintain the system after project end.
"Taysols consultants understand financial consolidations and the requirements of group finance. With their help, we managed to deliver the project on time and within budget.” Martin Murray, Finance Director, said.