Case Studies

 Problem:  US Subsidiary of a Foreign Corporation has been requested to change their inventory process to comply with IFRS standards.   Consequently, they have to calculate ending inventory using Weighted Average Cost rather than LIFO.   The Company has moved to SAP but still rely on legacy systems to capture purchases and sales. 

Approach:  Bionic System Analytics was called in to identify the historical and current data necessary to calculate inventory using the Weighted Average Cost method.  By using Agile methods, we were able to quickly prototype the process to understand the availability, volume and level of data needed to meet both internal and external audit requirements.   By working with real data we were  able to show the materiality impact of various assumptions and, thereby, control the complexity of the calculation; 

Solution:  Bionic System Analytics prototyped in Microsoft SQL, which made productionizing the process very efficient.  Moreover, the process was staged for an easy transition once the client's SAP Hanna  instance is fully operational.  In the interim, Bionic Systems will set up the process as an APP in their environment, an Azure Cloud instance or our Cloud environment and manage it in an analytics as a service model.   

Value Add: By identifying and leveraging data sets from other productionized processes, Bionic System Analytics could quickly prototype an inventory process with live data and allow the client to efficiently validate the process with external and internal auditors.  Further, by prototyping with SQL Server, the steps to productionize and stage the process for final incorporation into SAP Hanna went very smoothly and within budget.  

 Problem:  US Subsidiary of a Foreign Corporation has been requested to change their inventory process to comply with IFRS standards.   Consequently, they have to calculate ending inventory using Weighted Average Cost rather than LIFO.   The Company has moved to SAP but still rely on legacy systems to capture purchases and sales. 

Approach:  Bionic System Analytics was called in to identify the historical and current data necessary to calculate inventory using the Weighted Average Cost method.  By using Agile methods, we were able to quickly prototype the process to understand the availability, volume and level of data needed to meet both internal and external audit requirements.   By working with real data we were  able to show the materiality impact of various assumptions and, thereby, control the complexity of the calculation; 

Solution:  Bionic System Analytics prototyped in Microsoft SQL, which made productionizing the process very efficient.  Moreover, the process was staged for an easy transition once the client's SAP Hanna  instance is fully operational.  In the interim, Bionic Systems will set up the process as an APP in their environment, an Azure Cloud instance or our Cloud environment and manage it in an analytics as a service model.   

Value Add: By identifying and leveraging data sets from other productionized processes, Bionic System Analytics could quickly prototype an inventory process with live data and allow the client to efficiently validate the process with external and internal auditors.  Further, by prototyping with SQL Server, the steps to productionize and stage the process for final incorporation into SAP Hanna went very smoothly and within budget.  

Problem:  Client's sales tax specialist quit without notice with deadlines approaching for filing in multiple jurisdictions. 

Approach:  Bionic System Analytics  quickly worked with the client to identify the source of the data used for monthly tax filings.  The prior tax specialist was manually  querying Vertex tables by state and using Excel to create multiple pivots to prepare the data for State & Local filings.   Our approach was to capture the entire historical vertex file and extract, transform and load the data into a SQL server database. 

Solution:  Once the data set was identified,  our team determined the format required for reporting to the various tax jurisdictions and created the process to automate the steps necessary to create all of the State filing templates in minutes instead of days and automate the download these files to the client shared drive.  We also provided an APP in SharePoint that would allow the client to access data for multi-year audits and also automate the reconciliations of tax accounts to meet Blackline audit requirements.   

Value Add:  Our process took what was a two week process into a two day process.   The process has been simplified to the extent where the actual sales tax filings can be moved to a shared service center.  This allows the Tax group to leverage high-end  analytics to focus on compliance risk and work on process improvements to mitigate these risks.  

Problem:  An Enterprise Resource Planning system has multiple modules to manage finance, purchasing, projects, logistics Etc.   In order to integrate all of these modules,  transactions have to be linked and this result is lots and lots of transaction level detail.  Finance Groups use financial consolidation and reporting tools to timely close and report out financial results.  Unfortunately, the resulting summarized reports do not have the level of data needed by groups such as Tax, Budgeting and planning.   

Approach:  Our analysis showed us that much of the granular data that would make a data warehouse very unwieldy could be eliminated by summarization.  In order to do strategic summarization, we utilized big data techniques in our SQL Server Azure Cloud instance to pull fully summarize data sets from a data lake set up to capture the ERP detail.  This eliminated the space normally required for staged tables and made our data tables very efficient.   

Solution:  Bionic System Analytics was able to create a manageable tax data warehouse by summarizing certain journal voucher or document types on a monthly basis by account, cost center, product group and other meaningful dimensions needed to understand the flow of transactions.  Other manual or unique vouchers or documents were pulled in fully into the warehouse.  In this way, we have the granular data needed to explain unusual transactions.   Of course, the integration vouchers and documents would remain in the ERP and could be drilled for later if necessary.  Next we were able to use Microsoft business intelligence tools to provide the finance groups with self-serve cubes and dashboards. 

Value Add:  Our clients have used this data to operationalize their transfer pricing policies, created supportable headquarter bills to foreign subsidiaries, gather data for State & Local Apportionment, Research & Development Credits and more.