Company Background
Sterigenics, headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, and Leuven, Belgium, is a contract sterilization and ionization services provider for medical devices, food safety, and the treatment of high performance and specialty materials. The company has over 1,000 employees and operates in 40 service centers in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Project Goals & Objective
- Add ability for salespeople to enter forecast revenue by customer in current application
- Review calc scripts, delete old calc scripts, enhance existing calc scripts, debug calc scripts
- Install appropriate web server for planning application to ensure high system performance
- Assist with numerous miscellaneous tasks to improve the overall system performance
- Prepare 5-year Plan with increased ability to change assumptions from top management
- Focus on Phase III objectives while performing current build to avoid rework
Business Issues
Sterigenics was using Hyperion Planning to do their budgeting and forecasting for current year only. They wanted to have the ability to perform budgeting and forecasting for 5 consecutive years. Sterigenics tracked revenue by customers. There was no ability to track revenue generated by sales people, by major or minor customers, or by type of customer. They wanted to enable sales people to enter forecast revenue by customer. Sterigenics used Hyperion Application Link to extract data from Hyperion Essbase to load into Hyperion Financial Management (HFM). The data extract would need hours of manual manipulation before it could be uploaded into HFM. Sterigenics wanted the ability to modify the format of the output data, thereby eliminating the manual manipulation process.
- Hyperion Planning
- Hyperion Web Analysis
- Hyperion Financial Reporting
- Hyperion Application Link (modification)
Ranzal Role
Sterigenics selected Ranzal for Phase II Hyperion Planning implementation, the goal of which would be to substantially improve and enhance the functionality deployed in Phase I of the implementation. Ranzal performed a project assessment to determine the scope and required resources. The proposed implementation would require a joint effort from Sterigenics and Ranzal. Ranzal used a “mentoring” methodology to complete Phase II of this implementation. Ranzal would perform many of the complex tasks and also train Sterigenics resources throughout the implementation. Sterigenics resources would participate in the work required to complete this phase of the implementation. This would enable Sterigenics to reduce the cost of the project and at the same time to become self-sufficient in a timely manner. This approach allowed for the greatest transfer of knowledge and Sterigenics’ ownership of their Planning application.
Some of the modules Ranzal designed for Sterigenics include the following:
Alternate Customer Hierarchy: Created 3 new alternate hierarchies 'Total Major and Minor,’ 'Total Sales Person' and 'Total Business Line' with approximately 350 members each. Changed original customer hierarchy to 'Total Customers' and added additional customers. Added parent 'New List' in 'Total Customers' to ensure that customers in 'Total Major and Minor,' 'Total Sales Person' and 'Total Business Line' are shared members. Created required web forms to facilitate the entry and review of data. This allowed the sales people to enter the revenue data by customer. Sterigenics now has the ability to track revenue generated by sales people, by major and minor customers, and by type of customer.
5-year Module: This module allowed Sterigenics to perform their budgeting and forecasting for 5 years instead of only one year. The salary information entered in the first year would be automatically calculated based on merit increase for all 5 years. The OPEX and COGS would be calculated for 5 years. The facility allocation and the corporate expenses would be calculated for 5 years. Several calc scripts were modified and several new calc scripts were created to enable this functionality.
Hyperion Application Link Routine: The existing module would extract data from Hyperion Essbase in a format that needed hours of manual manipulation before the data was ready to be uploaded in HFM. There was high probability of manual errors. Modifying this module to give data extracted in the exact format as required for the HFM upload saved Sterigenics several hours. The Account, ICP, and four customer dimensions for HFM would be automatically populated by the module. This module performed data extract for all 5 years.
Business Benefits
- Ability to perform 5- year plan instead of 1- year plan in current application
- Ability for sales people to enter forecast revenue by customer in current application
- Huge time savings and elimination of manual errors due to modification of Hyperion Application Link routine to eliminate intermediate manual data modification process
