Tansy Brook, Director of Product Marketing at Oracle, shared the financial management success story of SRAM, a Chicago-based global manufacturer of high-end bicycle components. After many years of using Hyperion, SRAM decided to make the move to Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud (FCCS)—part of the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud suite.

About SRAM

SRAM was started in 1987, and in the 30+ years since, it has grown from six employees to 3,500 employees organically and through acquisitions. It is a $725 million private company that sells smart sporting goods in the United States, Europe and Asia. Smart sporting equipment incorporates advanced software-based technologies into the design of the equipment. Some of these technologies include analytics and augmented reality.

SRAM products, which include brands like SRAM, RockShox, Truvativ, Quarq, and Zipp, enable wireless/no-cable mechanical operation (shifting gears). They also provide analytics-based performance feedback to riders. This helps them reach fitness goals around distance, endurance, calories burned, etc.

The company emphasizes getting fit both physically and within their business model. Business health is all about taking in high-quality, real-time data and feeding it into an ongoing loop of innovation. Not only does SRAM embed fitness-tracking analytics in its unique products, but it also uses data to maintain lean internal operations. The internal team at SRAM wanted better access to more insights about business health so they could improve performance, just like the bicycle riders that they create products for.

This kind of improvement comes from software-driven automation, and Cloud computing and services are the tools that enable this automation. SRAM knew that moving to Cloud was the next step for modernizing its finance process.

Why Move to Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud?

SRAM has focused on “lean” business processes that can help the company become better, faster, and more efficient. Finance management was a big target area for creating leaner processes. SRAM had been on Hyperion Financial Management for years, and the system was beginning to age. The company was faced with a decision: Upgrade to a newer version of Hyperion (which required upgrading the database) or make the move to the Cloud?

It was important to SRAM to be able to keep its financial headcount in check by leveraging technology that helped accelerate and streamline financial close processes. This was a big driver for moving to the Cloud because a Cloud solution made sense with SRAM’s culture and industry, where speed and execution are critical.

“SRAM is a medium-sized company, and when looking to move to the cloud, we wanted a solution that was going to require minimal IT effort, along with satisfying the complex requirements that we have, such as intercompany eliminations and currency translation.”

—Ted Homewood, global director of finance for SRAM

Moving to Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud

SRAM worked with an implementation partner, Huron, to upgrade to Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud (FCCS). As SRAM moved away from their long-time Hyperion system, they looked forward to leverage capabilities that would allow the company to more quickly access, analyze, and act on its valuable enterprise data.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud uses best practices to streamline the consolidation and close process. It is easily configurable and ensures that processes are compliant, auditable, timely, and transparent. FCCS gave SRAM a preconfigured consolidation model, which makes it easier for the company to meet global reporting requirements while also driving significant cost and time savings. These process efficiencies have streamlined the consolidation and close process at SRAM.

The solution was easy to adopt, no new training was required for users since they had already been using Hyperion, and SRAM was able to eliminate the cost of maintaining its on-premises server. Most importantly, SRAM’s CFO is getting more and better business insight without involving IT experts.

The decision to move to a Cloud solution instead of upgrading the existing Hyperion system was made with the future in mind. Now SRAM will be able to scale quickly and cost-effectively as data volumes and software-automation capabilities continue to grow.

If you’re considering a move to the Cloud be sure to consider these Essentials for a Strategic Transition to Cloud Services.

For more information about how SRAM leveraged Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, check out the full Oracle blog or the video below.