Here’s a conundrum for the CFO. You give the green light for the company to invest more than US$774,000 on a software suite that is meant to strengthen controls in financial management and procurement, as well as enhance the quality and delivery times of financial reporting.

Six months after the system went live, monthly closing, which used to be completed in less than ten days, lengthened to 15 days. The finance team continues to work 12-hour days. And the basic software suite cannot easily generate the kind of customized reports demanded by management and the mother company, not to say the stock market.

What do you do?

In the case of US$382-million-a-year-in-sales CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited in Hong Kong, the answer is to keep the faith. “My team needs to learn how to use the system faster,” said Rosanna Lee, President, Finance. “I hope in two months, three months from now, we will see the benefits.” 

Doubling down on the investment, the company has been persuaded to purchase Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BIEE), an additional solution that promises to enhance the basic reporting capability of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), which CITIC Telecom bought in 2010 for its financial and procurement processes.

“Every company has unique requirements for reporting,” argued Tevens Kwong, Head of Application Service at systems integrator Karga Solutions, an Oracle Platinum Partner helping CITIC Telecom implement the software. “All the Tier I ERP solutions can provide only standard reporting to the user.” Neither SAP nor Oracle can “fulfill this part [customized reporting],” he said.

And to be fair, said Lee, “security is now better than in the past . . . I think my boss [CFO David Chan] is happy because he can trust that Oracle assures control and security, that these are implemented in the system.” EBS, she said, “will not make mistakes, human error.”