RCL and AccountView help Cray with its accounts
Using AccountView's flexible approach to integration with outside applications, Cray UK Ltd. has implemented a web based repository of financial information across their EMEA division.
In the computer industry, Seymour Cray is legendary, as the man who designed and built the most powerful computers of the day. Today the company that bears his name continues that work. Its massive supercomputers are bought by organisations who need massive number-crunching ability, with normal range mainframes merely acting as servants to the Cray, feeding it the massive amounts of data to be processed.
Cray operates worldwide, its principal customers being government bodies and research organisations. Headquartered in Seattle USA, its EMEA operations are overseen and controlled by Cray UK, in Reading. A key task is to collect financial data from the individual country operations, to consolidate, and pass on the figures to Cray Inc.
Clearly, one part of their strategy had to be to adopt a standard accounts package. Cray's Dutch regional controller was using AccountView, a pan-European package with a strong presence in Holland and Germany. He suggested that Cray should standardise on that. Cray UK accordingly contacted AccountView who recommended they speak to their local UK reseller, RCL.
Cray and RCL mulled over the design of the system. Finally, they decided that they would create a single Web site for all the countries, for both input and output of data. Each country would enter their transactions directly into this Web site, and local bookkeepers and country managers would get their financial reports out of it. This common applications area would remove local systems and give Cray the uniformity it needed.
RCL was tasked with implementing the overall concept in detail. One key task was to design a Web data input screen that would accommodate all eleven countries. Fortunately, RCL's staff are no strangers to multinational installations, having for many years been implementation consultants for the SAP ERP package.
Cray have three regional controllers in England, Holland and Germany. Each region in turn controls several countries. The first step was to install AccountView at each of these regional centres.
Local data entry is done via Cray's central web site. When a local bookkeeper wishes to make the day's postings, he logs onto this Web site. After entering the day's journals, he then clicks the Submit button to create an XML file, which is attached to an email, sent to his regional controller.
The regional controller detaches the XML file, checks its accuracy, then posts it into his local AccountView, updating the local country's accounts. The regional controller now creates an XML output file, which he transfers to the central web site. The local country bookkeeper can go into the web site and interrogate it to see his daybook postings, journals and ledgers.
At the same time the regional system creates an Excel file, in a format suitable for Cray's headquarters machine in the US, which is passed up to Cray UK. Cray UK consolidate these to produce their EMEA financial reports and then passes them on to the US.
Over the summer of 2001 RCL developed and tested the web system in conjunction with the regional controllers (and customised it to produce local management reports for each country). This work dealt with the task of uploading data from local country level through the regions to Cray U.K. But RCL also had to enable the UK to pass on transactions to Cray headquarters in the US. Cray Inc uses JD Edwards as their accounts package. Using AccountView's customisation facilities, RCL has enabled AccountView's General Ledger to automatically embed the equivalent JD Edwards nominal account codes into any transaction being created.
By the end of 2001 the work was done and all the local countries were on-line to the central web site, containing an Enquiries section allowing local bookkeepers and managers to view their own accounting reports over the web.
Acceptum backoffice system to e-commerce web site
SAWinesOnLine.co.uk has implemented Acceptum as a backoffice system to its e-commerce web site in order to control sales orders, stock levels and to produce financial data.
SAWinesOnLine.co.uk is part of the Orbit Management Services Ltd. group of companies; its business is to import South African wines into the UK and sell them via its e-commerce web site. Other parts of the group provide a commercial and financial framework for companies starting up operations within Europe. This latter area requiring a system that can handle numerous companies, each with a small volume of transactions, but at little or no extra cost and with no impact or crossover with the former trading part of the business.
The legacy system provided financial ledgers but did not include Sales Order Processing, or Stock Control to maintain product volumes. Such modules were available, but at a high cost. The lack of using such modules was creating problems, as only the total value of Sales and Receivables was entered into the ledgers based on information from web reports. The value/volume of stock was reconciled externally to the system, again using reports from the e-commerce web site.
Instead of extending their legacy system, SAWinesOnLine decided to completely replace their legacy system with Acceptum, taking the Base, Sales Orders and Multiply Database modules, for a price lower than that needed to extend the legacy system.
The business process put in place for Acceptum, is to have the e-commerce web site download its sales orders; for a given period of time; into a CSV file (Excel spreadsheet or XML format is also acceptable) placed on the companies server. From here Acceptum reads the CSV file to create Sales Orders in Acceptum, before changing the CSV file to show that it has been imported. The Sales Orders are then processed in the normal manner within Acceptum to record the delivery of each vintage despatched to the customer and to produce ledger entries to reflect the sales in the accounting ledgers.
Customer payment is handled as before, with credit card details being taken by the web site and monthly payment journals being processed for the total receipt from the credit card companies.
The Stock Control function has been configured so that for each particular wine, the total volume is broken down into vintage years, so providing greatly improved management visibility of stock levels for each wine across the vintages as the deliveries and invoices are posted.
The Sales Order processing modules is also used to process and invoice trade sales, which had previously been handled manually.
The Multiply Database module is used to ensure that the numerous and small management service companies are held in a separate database and do not impact in anyway; or are impacted by; the data held for the wine trading company.
Overall, Acceptum has greatly improved management information for Orbit Management, whilst at the same time reducing the level of manual effort. The system can expand as the company grows its customer base and web presence.
