MES Accounting Delivers Faster, More Reliable Reports
Protecting our organization’s assets is essential to helping our customers realize the benefits (and savings) of global manufacturing the MES way.
It’s also all in a day’s work for the MES Accounting Department.
Which is why our accounting team set out to ensure the most efficient, timely, and accurate financial reporting possible for MES global operations, an enterprise that include these eight worldwide locations:
- MES HQ (Columbus, Ohio)
- Metrics Works Columbus (Columbus, Ohio)
- Metrics Ningbo (Ningbo, China)
- Metrics Mexico (Monterrey, Mexico)
- Euro Metrics (Poland)
- Metrics Hong Kong (Hong Kong, China)
- Metrics Holdings (Columbus, Ohio)
- Metrics Works Saltillo (Saltillo, Mexico)
Expediting Financial Consolidation and Close
So, how’d they do it?
Under the direction of our CFO, Shraddha Patel, and spearheaded by our Accounting Manager, Christina Lyles, the team took on a year-long project that literally transformed and digitized our financial reporting, forecasting, and budgeting processes, workflows, and documentation.
With help from an industry-leading financial performance platform called Planful, the MES Accounting Department set out to help our organization reach peak financial performance.
“We needed a financial reporting tool that could automate and facilitate easy retrieval of reports from each of MES’s nine worldwide locations,” explains Christina. “We knew that with the right solution we could gain efficiencies with our financial consolidation and month-end close processes. Without an enterprise-wide solution, we would have to continue relying on complicated spreadsheets and disconnected systems—and that simply wasn’t good enough for MES and our customers.”
With so many different organizations, varying worldwide general ledger (GL) rules, and an assortment of reporting databases and methodologies, it’s not surprising that implementation took nearly a full year.
“We started migrating to Planful in November of last year,” explains Christina, “but it took a long time to validate the data and carry it over accurately. Having this new level of automation, however, was necessary to consolidate our companies not just for internal management, but also for our banks and auditors. In the end, the time and effort our entire team spent was worth it.”
Centralized Data Repository
In today’s data-driven world, accounting teams are facing massive amounts of financial information from various sources. And the MES accounting team is no stranger to this. In 2022, our accounting team began using Azure Data Lake as a way to pull data from various sources, including MESH, Metrics Portal, and Global SAP locations. By creating a centralized repository for all of our data, Azure Data Lake streamlines our data management and analysis. This not only simplifies compliance but also empowers our accounting team to leverage advanced analytics for predictive forecasting, comprehensive reporting, and other reporting types. With Azure Data Lake, the MES accounting team can gain deeper insights into their financial data, make informed decisions, and ultimately enhance their overall financial operations.
Decreased Cycle Times
Thanks to the tools within the Planful solution, the Accounting Department freed up time that was once spent manually collecting and tracking financial metrics. Now, the disparate data and spreadsheet formulas have been replaced with an interconnected and streamlined system that speeds up generation of accurate and comprehensive financial reports, and it helps the 15-person global accounting team plan, budget, and forecast with ease.
“Planful delivered everything we needed and more, including automated reporting, risk mitigation, built-in collaboration, and full control,” says Christina. “Now we spend less time on creating manual spreadsheets and more time making smarter operational and financial decisions.”
Increased Efficiencies
Even better? By leveraging this advanced technology, the Accounting Department has created efficiencies that have a direct impact on MES’s ability to serve customers.
In addition to automation of more timely and accurate reports, Planful empowers MES to scale up if and when we add to our global supply chain solutions.
“Our success is a direct result of our people and their innovative mindset,” says MES President Hiten Shah. “We continue to ask ourselves, ‘How can we do this better for our customers, our associates, and our organization?’ Investing in tools, technology, and our people allows us to continuously streamline our work and provide best-in-class, global manufacturing and engineered supply chain solutions.”
To learn more about the MES way or how we can help with your next sourcing, quality engineering, supply chain management, or warehousing project, please contact us.
