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Saturday, 20th April 2024 |
| Group reporting evolution at Airbus |
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| IFSC aircraft leasing company Airbus explain how an enterprise reporting system from Ciall Systems was implemented into its business. |
The Airbus operation in Dublin’s IFSC is focussed on customer support for airlines which operate Airbus equipment, and aircraft financing is an intrinsic part of the operation. In order to facilitate certain financing transactions, the operation has established a number of SPV’s, which contain and manage certain high value transactions. There are extensive reporting requirements for each of these SPV’s, both internally to the Airbus group and externally, which include:
• Statutory reporting under Irish & UK GAAP
• Group reporting under IAS GAAP
• Management reporting - monthly and quarterly
• Business Segment analysis
• Budgeting and forecasting
Analysis
In 1998 an internal review of reporting requirements was carried out, and it was identified that the existing standard reports were focussed on the legal entities rather than the group business segments.
As a result it was decided that a proactive stance needed to be adopted in order to improve on the following areas:
• Speed of reporting
• Flexibility
• Any requirement for manual intervention (possibly leading to enhanced risk of error)
• The number of existing spreadsheets of increasing complexity
• Audit trail
The way forward
In order to progress the above, Airbus selected the Dublin based reporting and consolidation specialists, Ciall Systems, to implement the Great Plains solution, Enterprise Reporting (‘ER’), to address all of their reporting requirements.
The approach taken was to follow a phased design and implementation plan. This involved the following phases:
Phase 1: Review of existing and potential future requirements.
Phase 2: Review of input required to fulfil these requirements.
Phase 3: Design chart of accounts to support group reporting and consolidation.
Phase 4: Development of structures and reports to support group reporting requirements.
Phase 5: Automated integration between ER and General Ledger.
Phase 6: Integration of budgeting and reporting.
The result
The implementation of Enterprise Reporting has required extensive input by group finance personnel throughout the various phases of the project. However we have achieved the following gains:
Focus of reporting: enhanced quality of reporting with a focus on business units rather than legal structures.
Speed of reporting: significantly reduced reporting timelines on a monthly basis through the elimination of labour intensive spreadsheets and manual intervention.
Model maintenance: Adding new companies, accounts, changing disclosure requirements - these are now all handled through easy to use trees and tables (as compared with major changes to integrated spreadsheets).
Flexibility of reporting: We can now consolidate numbers simultaneously using a range of different structures - including structures based on statutory entities, type of aircraft, and location of customer. This assists us greatly in meeting reporting requirements to different departments within the Airbus corporate structure.
Reduced risk: All data is now held in a robust database and audit trails are automatically generated for all journal postings (as against using multiple columns in spreadsheets) and the model supports controlled, secure, multi-user access.
Change is inevitable and consequently group reporting will continue to evolve in Airbus. In order to meet future reporting requirements Airbus now has in place a dynamic, robust, model which is built on industry standard database technology and which is designed to support ongoing change while providing fast, efficient reporting.
Our current efforts in Airbus, in conjunction with Ciall Systems, are now focussed on further refinements to the corporate budgeting and forecasting models.
Frank Dowling is financial controller of Airbus. |
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| Article appeared in the May 2001 issue.
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