MTN’s Chris Badenhorst: Standardised reporting is important because you need to trust the numbers.
The mobile telecom provider is using Oracle’s application suite to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its budgeting, financial reporting, and tax compliance.
One of the big benefits we've seen in Oracle Cloud EPM’s narrative reporting is having one version of the truth. Standardized reporting is very important for us because you need to trust the numbers.— Chris Badenhorst, Senior Manager, Systems, MTN Group
Business Challenge
Johannesburg-based MTN Group offers cellular, internet, and mobile money-transfer services to 300 million subscribers in 23 African and Middle Eastern countries.
Dependent on spreadsheets for much of its budgeting, financial reporting, and tax compliance, it ran into data-entry errors, differing calculations, and numbers that had been updated in some places but not others. As a result, its financial processes were too slow and error-prone, especially for a company that needed to become ever-more digital and agile.
MTN wanted to simplify its application portfolio and standardize its processes to move faster, increase accuracy, and ultimately boost workforce effectiveness.
Results
MTN Group estimates that Oracle Cloud EPM has helped it reduce its head-office budget preparation time by 50%, because when its people were emailing spreadsheets around, every time a number changed, someone had to reconsolidate and re-aggregate the numbers. What’s more, company finance leaders and other executives now have access to the same, accurate numbers.
Meanwhile, by implementing Oracle Cloud EPM’s tax reporting application, MTN has shortened the reporting cycle and strengthened tax-provisioning oversight across its 23 operating geographies. Now, tax provisioning calculations and their comparisons with the group effective tax rate are done monthly instead of quarterly.
Previously saddled with high maintenance costs for its various financial applications, MTN has lowered its costs by standardizing on one cloud-based platform.
Why They Chose Oracle
MTN Group chose to standardize on Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management, determining that the Oracle platform’s breadth of applications are unparalleled. ”If you are looking for a full-suite solution, there is actually no other vendor in the market to consider,” says Johan Pretorius, MTN general manager of enterprise performance management.
