Prior to 1997, the company operated very labour-intensive manual accounting processes on Tetra accounting software.

The introduction of SAP ERP software allowed finance-relevant data to be gathered during manufacturing, procurement, and sales business processes, which could then be used to:

• • Automatically value all raw materials, subassemblies, and finished goods.

  • Allow work in progress to be costed automatically as part of the month-end closing process.

Once fully implemented along with sales and purchase order processing, this allowed month-end accounts to be prepared and consolidated for the Group within three days of the month-end.

As the finance function evolved:

• • An Annual Business Planning (ABP) process was introduced to set a budget for each financial year.

  • A Rolling Business Model (RBM) was developed to forecast and reforecast 12 months ahead as part of a new Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) function within the finance department.

Manual low-level accounting tasks within the areas of Accounts Payable, Expense Processing, and Fixed Assets were later outsourced to a Shared Services Centre (SSC) to reduce costs.

Extensive financial benchmarking processes were later introduced to ensure KPIs were in line with other Cat divisions and competitors.

In 1997, FG Wilson embarked on a four year "M3" business transformation project to 

• Mobilise our people

• Modernise our processes

• Maximise our profitability

The project brought together representatives from all departments within the company to work collaboratively to identify inefficiencies and bottle necks within end to end business processes.

Michael was the full time finance representative on the project

The team spent an entire year on detailed "as is" and "to be" process mapping and on the root cause analysis of issues

Extensive training was undertaken during this period, both by the team and later with all business users on the concept of MRP to ensure the transformation wasn't simply an I.T. implementation 

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Running in parallel with the M3 business process mapping was the implementation of SAP ERP software (along with "to be" processes)

From a finance point of view:

• Phase 1 of the project was to replace existing finance software with the equivalent SAP modules.

• Phase 2 involved working collaboratively with production, sales, engineering, and logistics staff within the project team and beyond to introduce new functionality to allow inventory to be valued.

New SAP management accounting functionality was introduced in parallel to provide new insights to improve decision-making.

Once the project was completed:

• SAP was continuously improved and developed at Cat NI.

• It was replicated in new locations and collaboration took place with other Cat legal entities implementing SAP.

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