Eutelsat

About Eutelsat

Founded in 1977, Eutelsat is one of the world’s leading satellite operators. With its global satellite fleet and ground infrastructure, the group enables its customers in the Video, Data, Government Services and Fixed and Mobile Connectivity sectors to establish efficient links to their own customers, wherever they are. Eutelsat broadcasts some 7,000 channels, operated by the world’s leading broadcasters, reaching an audience of one billion people equipped for satellite reception or connected to terrestrial networks.

Headquartered in Paris, Eutelsat is supported by a global network of offices and teleports. Its 1,200 employees from 50 countries are committed to providing the highest quality of service every day. To learn more, please visit Eutelsat.com.

“We have the application we wanted to have at the time of the specification. We can measure the immediate gains, and we can also project future gains, thanks to the win-win relationship we have established with Accenture around the implementation of OneStream. We look forward to further developments with confidence, for even greater benefits.”

– Romuald Bichot, Group Controlling Director, Eutelsat

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The Challenge

Eutelsat is Europe’s leading operator of fixed satellite services. Highly focused on the new challenges of the digital economy, Eutelsat provides high-speed access to information from around the world. Eutelsat has become an indispensable source of performance for companies and telecom operators in more than 150 countries, thanks to a wide range of services in the interconnection and security of networks and data broadcasting.

A few years ago, Eutelsat initiated a finance transformation process that included replacing their existing EPM solution with a new, modern approach. The aim was to find a proven software platform that would allow Eutelsat to set up a standardized, unified process for financial consolidation, management control and reporting. It was also important to have an agile and scalable solution to support the company’s transformation and involve all the players in the process.

With this project, Eutelsat’s finance team took time to rethink current financial processes and put a strategy forth that would shorten the time needed to produce critical business figures, and provide benefits across Accounting, Management Control and Consolidation teams. To accomplish this and more, Eutelsat opted not to upgrade their current solution, and instead explore the market.

The Evaluation Process

Eutelsat’s finance department launched an extensive EPM evaluation process with clear specifications in mind, based on the review of their current processes, technical architecture, expected functionality, and the needs of their global landscape of subdivisions.

Eutelsat began their search by looking at eight software vendors before creating a short list of four possible solutions. A POC was requested from the short-listed vendors, and it was the joint response of OneStream and implementation partner Accenture, that convinced Eutelsat of the high quality of the OneStream system and its proven record of success.

OneStream appeared to be the most balanced solution to meet Eutelsat’s needs, by replacing multiple products with one unified platform. Eutelsat particularly liked the availability of transactional and multi-dimensional data stores and advanced workflow functionality in the system. Plus, the OneStream MarketPlaceTM was an innovative and scalable approach to seamlessly expanding the platform.

The Implementation Project

The upstream framing of the project made it possible to reconcile end-user and management needs, to optimize processes, and to share and validate the structuring points before implementation.  When the project was launched, Eutelsat decided to extend their original scope of budgeting only, to also include financial consolidation to the overall project.

Phase 1 of the implementation focused on management reporting and planning, including the management control of budget preparation. Phase 2 of the project tackled statutory consolidation. Thanks to help from Accenture, each of these projects were treated with care. This included a month-long scoping exercise, a detailed design built out over two months, a four-month strategic implementation, and training for 50 users over a two-week span.

The Results

Among the most immediate benefits of the OneStream implementation was process optimization. Eutelsat’s budget preparation process was redesigned according to the size of the entities and based on OneStream’s data entry assistance features. With this change, Eutelsat has gained greater autonomy for the Management Control team in administering the application and has realized significant benefits for IT in terms of processing time and the stability and size of the application.

System adoption has been facilitated by OneStream’s guided workflow functionality, which provides users better control over their application so they can get up to speed very quickly. In addition to the power and scalability of OneStream, Eutelsat’s finance department users are very enthusiastic about its features, which help transform and modernize financial processes. The users’ favorite features include Excel® integration, an embedded scheduler to plan any processing, the flexibility of ETL, and workflow management.

For Eutelsat, OneStream has proven itself as an advanced EPM platform with ability to cover statutory consolidation (IFRS) based on FSK, and financial planning, budgeting, and reporting. Eutelsat considers OneStream as a one-stop shop for the FP&A and consolidation teams.

According to Romuald Bichot, Group Controlling Director and Guillaume Giacomini, Head of BI and EPM at Eutelsat, “With OneStream, we have the application that we wanted when we wrote the specifications. We can measure the immediate gains, and we can also project future gains, thanks to the win-win relationship we have established with Accenture, around the implementation of OneStream. We look forward with confidence to further development and even greater benefits.”

About the Implementation Partner

Accenture is a consulting firm specializing in business performance management solutions created in 2007. Accenture supports the financial and business departments of its clients, large international groups and small and medium-sized companies, in the digital transformation of their management. Accenture is involved in the entire value chain around reporting, forecasting and legal consolidation processes, with a triple expertise: from consulting to optimize processes, collaborative implementation of management software packages to industrialize them, to the deployment of these software packages in the cloud and their technical support when organizations wish to outsource it.

For more information, visit Accenture.com.

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