Brunswick Corporation, a market leader in the marine, fitness, and bowling and billiards industries, has successfully implemented Longview Consolidation to streamline and improve financial consolidation and management reporting processes at the corporate level and across its four global operating units – Mercury Marine Group, Brunswick Boat Group, Life Fitness Division, and Brunswick Bowling & Billiards.
With multiple locations in multiple countries all using different reporting applications and operating in their own local currencies, financial consolidation and closing the books at Brunswick was a complicated exercise requiring considerable effort and presenting numerous challenges.
Not having sufficiently detailed operating unit financial data accessible at the corporate level, for example, made it difficult to respond to a growing number of information requests from senior management, industry and financial analysts, and auditors. Finance staff were often required to go right back down to the source general ledger location internationally, relying on phone calls, multiple e-mails and a manual consolidation effort to pull together required information.
To overcome these challenges, Brunswick replaced its failing legacy consolidation and management reporting system with the Longview Consolidation application, which was easily configured to accommodate data from 50+ different source systems in 250 reporting units and in 20 to 25 different local currencies.
“We needed the ability to have a large number of accounts and entity hierarchies to do all the reporting we required, and we saw Longview as the best tool to meet those needs,” says Cathy Olstad, Senior Manager, Financial Systems, Brunswick Corporation.
Longview Consolidation not only makes it easier for Brunswick finance staff to close the books in a timely fashion, but as the single financial data source for the entire organization, it has enabled Brunswick to drive consistency into the management reporting across all divisions.
“The process efficiency we get by using the Workflow feature to automatically manage the whole close process and schedule is probably one of the best benefits of using Longview,” says Olstad, describing how it not only helps them manage the process of going out to all the transactional GL systems in the operating units to gather detailed consolidation data, but also improves data quality by moving some of the validations closer to the people who best understand the source data and thus are best able to make corrections quickly and accurately.
The Brunswick project gave Longview the opportunity to demonstrate its continued commitment to building relationships based on providing unparalleled customer support – from initial feasibility, planning and architecture phases, right through to implementation and ongoing support.
“Longview has always taken a true partnership approach to our relationship and they are very open when working with us,” says Olstad. “We can just pick up the phone any time and speak directly with the system architect or technical support and we don’t have to jump through hoops to get something addressed.”
“We’re very pleased about the opportunity and the results of the Longview implementation at Brunswick,” says John Power, President of Longview Solutions. “It’s an excellent example of how a global organization with strategic vision is leveraging world-class technology from Longview to realize tangible, quantifiable business benefits.”