Rapidly-Growing Energy Firm Saves $100,000 in Administrative Costs and Reduces Budget Creation Time by 152 Man-Hour Days.
Hyperion (Nasdaq Global Select: HYSL), the global leader in Business Performance Management (BPM) software, today announced that Canadian energy leader Inter Pipeline Fund (Inter Pipeline) has successfully leveraged Hyperion BPM solutions to trim more than $100,000 in administrative costs while reducing the number of hours it takes to prepare budgets by 76 percent.
A global petroleum transportation, storage and natural gas liquids extraction business based in Calgary, Alberta, Inter Pipeline achieved the efficiencies by automating a manual, spreadsheet-based budgeting and reporting infrastructure, even as it saw its revenues grow by more than 1,000 percent in the past five years. In June, Inter Pipeline ranked 62nd on Profit Magazine’s PROFIT 100 list of the fastest growing companies in Canada.
After evaluating eight commercial solutions, Inter Pipeline selected a range of Hyperion BPM solutions, including Hyperion’s planning, financial management, and reporting software. Help from two consulting firms, Vertical Pitch and Dakota Analytics, enabled the organization to achieve the deployments of Hyperion systems, and to see results in only a few months.
With Hyperion software’s purpose-built modules, Inter Pipeline was able to phase in its deployment by starting first on planning and budgeting in 2004, and then moving to financial reporting, management and compliance starting in 2005. Hyperion’s planning software gave managers greater control over planning and budgeting and allowed them to enforce an established workflow to secure approvals for late changes, solving a significant problem that had caused roadblocks in the budgeting process.
Inter Pipeline deployed Hyperion’s reporting software to fix an internal budget reporting system that required two hours or more to run complicated reports, limiting the organization to publishing only five to seven reports a month. But today some 65 Inter Pipeline employees across the organization use Hyperion to streamline the annual budgeting process. Inter Pipeline also uses Hyperion’s reporting software to automatically update 100 reports each month comparing actual numbers to budget and forecast variances.
For monthly financial statements, quarterly income statements, external reporting and monthly consolidation, Inter Pipeline’s finance department relies on Hyperion’s financial management software. Hyperion features like currency translation save the organization precious man-hours every month. Meanwhile, the senior financial accountant can drill down into financial results to gain a better understanding of the organization’s performance. By replacing spreadsheets with automated windows and Web-based tools, Hyperion also has outfitted the organization with a stronger, more trusted compliance process, virtually eliminating the potential for formula errors, manual errors and missed data.
“With tight budget deadlines and 1,000 spreadsheets, achieving reliable accuracy was very time consuming,†said Mark Mazurek, senior pipeline accountant at Inter Pipeline. “In our previous system, results were linked through formulas, so it was a huge administrative task to make sure our numbers were as accurate as possible. But as a result of deploying Hyperion we reduced the time needed to create a budget from 200 man-hour days to 48 — a 76 percent reduction — and we saved about $100,000 in administrative time.â€