MultiCorp is a conglomerate company with three diverse strategic units acting as

independent businesses under separate brands in different industry sectors$.$ As a result,

Multicorp is governed by the central head office, which oversees the three subsidiary

business units and their financial performance indicators without any operative

interventions. Each strategic business unit has its managing director who has complete

discretion and accountability for its competitive strategy, investment priorities, budget

allocation, and yearly profits or losses.

Recently, MultiCerp's CEO has been concerned because the process for generating

financial statements has not met the target of $10$ business days. The last four

consolidated statements have taken between $13$ to $17$ business days. The CEO has

been talking to the CFO about what can be done. The CFO has been researching the

problem with the controller of MultiCerp, and the Finance Directors from the business

units. She concluded that a solution might require the adoption of a standard chart of

accounts across all business units and$/$or the implementation of financial consolidation

software. These actions will likely accelerate the closing processes and create

consolidated financial reporting on time $($Hint: Remember that closing financial reporting

requires the summarization of income, expenses, liabilities, equities, assets, and

intracompany eliminations$).$

After completing the research on the situation, the CFO of MultiCorR, met with the CEO

and CIO. And the outcome of the discussion is that a Financial Closing Software needs

to be implemented. The CIO was tasked with researching alternatives, and products

from SAP and Oracle were analyzed. After a detailed evaluation, the CFO, CIO and

their teams have recommended launching a pilot of Oracle Enterprise Performance

Management, Cloud version $($EPM Cloud$).$ This software is offered as Software as a

Service $($SaaS$),$ and Oracle's Cloud hosts it$.$

According to preliminary estimations, the expectation is that the time it would take to

close the consolidated financial statements can be reduced to six business days. The

CEO and the IT governance committee are thrilled about the potential improvement that

can be achieved. They have approved initiating the piloting process that will last for six

months.

The CIO evaluated different Oracle Partners and hired FinTek Consulting to be jn$\_$

charge.of the pilot. EinTek's portfolio of customers includes several organizations similar

in size and operational structure to Multicorp.

The initial assessment from FinTek Consulting discouraged using a standard chart of

accounts given the lack of data and process standardization under which MultiCerr

Operates. However, they believe that the current structure that cross$-$references the

different charts of accounts can be configured in EPM Cloud. So$,$ they will start by

configuring Unit Gamma because it already uses an on$-$premise version of PeopleSoft,

an Oracle ERP product. This setting makes it easy to configure the standard interface

with EPM Cloud.

Further, Unit Alpha utilizes different instances of on$-$premises SAP Business One ERP,

which has a module that consolidates all the financial information of Alpha. FinTek,

Consulting is sure that configuring the utility software to export financial data to EPM

cloud will not be a problem.

Finally, unit Beta uses at least three different Point of Sale systems that interface with a

proprietary Accounting system developed in$-$house. EioTek consulting knows they will

have to create customized scripts to facilitate exporting financial information into EPM

Cloud. It may take them up to $6$ weeks to complete the scripts that will enable the

interfaces. From this perspective, they anticipate that the pilot will be able to

complete $3$ to $4$ financial closings, which should be sufficient for Multicore to decide if

EPM Cloud is a good fit. FinTek has also suggested that the pilot is limited to what is

known as "thin ledger" which means that only summarized information will be

consolidated. However, they indicate that in future iterations, a more detailed

consolidation can take place $("$thick ledger" integration$),$ and that would open the

possibility for more sophisticated near real$-$time performance indicators driven by the

latest analytics.

The CEO of MultiCorp is also concerned with recent ransomware attacks that have

been on the news. So she has explicitly expressed that Multicorp must use the highest

level of security and encryption for IT systems. Multicorp's CIO has realized that they

will have to migrate to a $256$ encryption standard to cover data at rest and motion. He

also considering implementing dual$-$ factor authentication within the next $12$ months.

The mandate for increased security will impact the databases that store financial

information and the cloud infrastructure MultiCerp uses to backup data and host the

email servers of the headquarters and bus