Client background:

• Client: Leading American educational publishers
• Industry type: Publishing
• Products or services: Educational technology, eBooks, books, platform services
• Areas of operations: USA

Challenge

Rapid growth and revenue increases compelled a U.S.-based publishing company to transform its operations to accelerate financial closure times. Providing a single source of truth would be critical to ensuring finance teams’ efficiency, visibility, and accuracy, but it would require a wholesale reimagining of the enterprise’s infrastructure. Unified systems would avoid redundancies and siloed data, while harmonized and streamlined processes throughout the sales journey would reduce intercompany transactions and enhance reporting. The company planned to implement a global cloud-based operating model that could scale with its increasing sales, maintain compliance, and strengthen engagements with business partners. 

Solution

To establish a unified enterprise with streamlined operations and reporting,the publishing leader began by engaging Wipro to redesign its global financial infrastructure — from legal entities and business units to inventory operations. Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials, in conjunction with Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), was chosen to give the company an integrated view of its financial systems and allow easy access to data.

The company leveraged Wipro’s Zoom to Cloud methodology  to accelerate its cloud implementation and standardize processes across multiple geographies and partner businesses. Zoom to Cloud contained a series of platforms that helped achieve the project objectives: JumpStart Kit, a library of enterprise business process maps, harmonized business procedures; Quick Migration to Cloud (QuMiC) accelerated the data and configuration migration efforts; and the Wipro Standard Test Accelerator (WiSTA) streamlined solution testing with its suite of prebuilt test cases and automation tools.

The publisher also employed Wipro’s home-grown finance demo kit (a set of standard process maps and templates for the finance processes) to standardize finance processes. This improved the accuracy and speed of transactions such as closures, new partner onboarding, and payments. Also, to help employees transition to the new system and drive adoption, Wipro collaborated with the company to conduct workshops on usage and benefits.

Business Impact

After adopting the Oracle-based global cloud solution, the publisher’s financial operations delivered a reporting system that enabled faster and more accurate business decisions. The company also reduced its financial cycle times by 5 days and saw tech-support costs drop by 30%. Using its new system, the publisher onboarded business partners to its financial infrastructure faster and more seamlessly, and it was able to maintain closer connections with distributors, vendors, and sales partners. In terms of compliance, the multifaceted solution fully aligned with Sarbanes-Oxley and global tax compliancy standards, ensuring accurate data reporting with the necessary internal controls. With revenues expected to increase, the publisher created a scalable, resilient financial infrastructure to help drive its business strategy and handle future growth.