Halcyon makes industrial pumps at eleven sites across the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Fourteen hundred and fifty people, twenty-two of them in finance, and eleven different opinions about what counts as maintenance.
The situation
The group close was a consolidation exercise, and consolidation was the polite word for it. Each site ran its own spreadsheet, coded purchases its own way, and sent a workbook up on a date it chose itself.
- Eleven charts of accounts that had drifted apart over nine years.
- A purchasing inbox where an invoice waited for whoever recognised the supplier name.
- A legacy AP tool that two sites had never been migrated onto at all.
Group finance spent the first two weeks of every month translating. Not analysing — translating. A pump housing was a component at one site, a spare at another, and consumables at a third, and the only way to know was to ask someone who had been there long enough to remember.
The change
The fix was not a new chart of accounts. Halcyon had tried that twice. It was making the coding happen at the point of purchase, where the person actually knows what they are buying, instead of at the point of consolidation, where nobody does.
Cards carry the site and the category before they are issued. Supplier invoices arrive against a purchase order that already has both. Nine weeks, site by site, and no plant stopped buying anything for a single day.
We did not standardise eleven charts of accounts. We stopped needing to, which turned out to be a much easier project.
Marta Solis · Group Financial Controller, Halcyon
The outcome
The consolidated close runs on day four. It ran on day nineteen the year before, and the difference is almost entirely the two weeks of translation that no longer happen.
The quieter win is the site reports. A plant manager asking what their line spent last week used to be a data request with a three-week queue in front of it; it is now a filter. Two of the eleven sites have started running their own weekly reviews off it without asking group for anything.
