You want to go to a single global chart of accounts.

Problem

A pharmaceutical company is upgrading to R12 in their Oracle E-Business Suite because of the capability to have multiple ledgers. Their current set up had a separate set of books for each of the European countries because they implemented before the Euro was the European standard currency. Since they originally implemented with seven separate sets of books for each of the countries where they did business in Europe, they didn’t see a need to standardize on a single chart of accounts. Now, in R 12, they can record all transactions in a single ledger because the currency is the same. However, in order to use a single primary ledger, they need to have a single chart of accounts.

The company created their new chart of accounts, and mapped each of the seven charts of accounts to the new chart of accounts. Using FlexField software, they completed the conversion process to their new chart of accounts with three test runs in 5 months. In two of the segments, they made the segments large enough to allow each country to have its own range of values. Using security and cross validation rules, they were able to restrict access to those values, giving each country some freedom in the way they controlled operations without limiting the company’s ability to operate globally with consistent data. As a side, they are able to close their books each month in 3 days instead of the 12 days that it took before the chart of accounts change. They estimate that they have reduced operating costs for their accounting team by approximately 35%.

You want to go to a single global chart of accounts, but can't make the change all at once.

Problem

An international mining company had three instances of Oracle E-Business Suites with approximately 30 charts of accounts. The intent was to move to a single global instance. Each of the charts of accounts had different segments and value sets. Even after consolidating their databases into a single data center, reporting across charts of accounts was very difficult because the controllers were comparing apples and oranges.

Solution

When they consolidated their instances, they still maintained 30 sets of books, each with their own chart. After they completed their testing for the consolidation, they decided it was time to change their chart so that everyone could report the same way. The company designed a new chart of accounts called their Global Chart of Accounts (GCOA). Starting with their corporate instance, they mapped their US chart of accounts to GCOA and changed it using FlexField software. Many of their new segment values depended on multiple segments for their values. For instance, sometimes the new activity segment depended on the old values in the cost center segment, sometimes it depended on the combination of values in the old cost center and the old account, and sometimes, it depended on the country, the product line, the cost center and the account.

They decided to use FlexField's code combination mapping. For some of the countries, going to the global chart of accounts all at once was a huge step for them in terms of training and understanding the new account structure. Some of the smaller organizations did not have the resources to make all the changes to their interfaces and reports. For about 8 of the charts of accounts, the source data was coming from many external systems. For about half of the organization, the decision was made to go to an interim chart of accounts that had all the segments for the global chart of accounts, but they did use some of the same value sets from the existing chart of accounts as they rebuilt all the interfaces and reports. An interim chart of accounts was designed and mapped to the current chart of accounts (ICOA). Twenty-seven of the 30 charts of accounts have gone live on either the new global chart of accounts or the new interim chart of accounts within the last 12 months. The company plans to do another chart of accounts change using FlexField software before upgrading to R12 to get all the countries that are on the interim chart of accounts to the new GCOA.