Ørsted. Flexible reporting solutions to drive a clean energy agenda

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1 Ørsted Flexible reporting solutions to drive a clean energy agenda

2 Ørsted: A flexible reporting solution to drive a clean energy agenda Renewable energy company Ørsted relies on having a corporate reporting platform that allows for accurate, transparent reporting of crucial financial and non-financial information. Since becoming a CXO-Cockpit customer four years ago, Ørsted has been able to greatly enhance its reporting activities, adding more detailed insight into the company s financial performance, as well as crucial information around sustainability and employee welfare. Ørsted, previously known as DONG (short for Danish Oil and Natural Gas), develops and deploys clean energy solutions, and is committed to a coal-free clean energy future. In 2017, the company underwent a number of major transformations, changing its name to that of the nineteenth-century Danish scientist and electromagnetism discoverer, Hans Christian Ørsted, and divesting its oil and gas production business. Today, Ørsted employs more than 5,600 employees across Scandinavia, the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, USA and Taiwan. As a growing organization and a leading player in the clean energy revolution, the company needed a flexible corporate reporting solution that could keep track of its expanding activities, while also helping to keep track of its ambitious environmental and sustainability goals. A strategic investment To better outline the detail of the firm s Annual Reports, Ørsted was looking for graphic online dashboard that would allow in-depth reporting and easy commenting. Furthermore, Ørsted wanted to reduce the cost and effort of maintaining its dashboards by making them easier to configure and adapt. And, due to the mobile nature of Ørsted s employees, the firm also wanted to make its reporting system compatible with mobile devices, specifically Apple ipads.

3 With these objectives in mind, Ørsted became a CXO-Cockpit client in June There are now more than 100 active users across the organization, with access also given to the company s external auditing team. Employees use CXO-Cockpit for HFM for both financial and non-financial information. A wide range of applications Ørsted uses CXO-Cockpit for three distinct functions: internal financial reporting, external financial reporting, and non-financial reporting. In particular, the non-financial reporting functionality, which also retrieves information by connecting to HFM databases, was added to the firm s CXO package two years ago, and has since become a crucial value-adding service for the company. Internal reporting bespoke applications CXO-Cockpit has added significant value to Ørsted s internal financial reporting approach. As well as allowing for simple and straightforward Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow analysis, Ørsted creates Top 10 rankings of internal business performance on a range of topics. CXO makes compiling these rankings quick and easy. Users simply click on a specific line-item within a table and the appropriate ranking is automatically generated in a separate adjacent table. A central feature for Ørsted users is being able to annotate the tables with comments. System controlling a unique application Somewhat uniquely, Ørsted also uses CXO-Cockpit for system controlling. Users create overviews with checks to see whether data entered in HFM is both correct and consistent. As they do so, they uncover both hard validations which must be 100% correct as well as soft validations which are used as warning and for flagging items that require further inspection. For example, users may wish to check whether data movements fully account for the difference between balance sheet items month-over-month. Another key CXO function allows users to check whether a P&L account is aligned with the equivalent Cash Flow.

4 External reporting a key cog in the annual reporting process Ørsted also allows its external auditors access to CXO-Cockpit to cross-check and validate their own reports. The simple set-up of CXO s external reporting section makes it easy for the auditor to find the information they re looking for, adding speed and efficiency to the process of crafting an annual report. It also means fewer questions and queries being reverted to Ørsted saving on internal time and resources. Helping Ørsted meet its sustainability target Social and environmental sustainability is clearly of paramount importance to Ørsted, and one of several parts of the business where the non-financial reporting functions come into play. As a green company with a keen clean energy focus, it is also essential for Ørsted to keep close control over its monthly fuel (oil, natural gas, coal, biomass) usage, which can be done easily through CXO. The commentary function is used by employees to explain why usage is higher than forecasted, or has risen over a previous month. Monitoring customer satisfaction is another important focus. Through CXO-Cockpit, Ørsted is able to report customer feedback on a monthly basis and to keep an accurate check on the number of complaints received something that is reported with transparency in the Annual Report. Looking after its people Other important non-financial reporting applications include generating breakdowns and rankings based on critical employee information. With CXO-Cockpit, this data is categorized into five separate reports, which are grouped under People. Two of these reports focus on site safety. Similar to the firm s financial reporting approach, users rank these locations according to their safety record, with sites with the most injuries displaying at the top of the list. The other reporting topics include measuring employee satisfaction, FTEs and staff turnover. Each of these categories presents considerable detail: FTEs are sub-categorized by age group, while turnover is broken down by gender and the reasons for each employee s departure. All of the data generated can then be analyzed and compared on a month-on-month and year-on-year basis.

5 Conclusion What Ørsted shows is that CXO-Cockpit is much more than a financial reporting tool. CXO-Cockpit is being used fo a wide variety of functions combining both financial and non-financial data and allowing in-depth reporting and easy commenting. It has supported Ørsted in their abillity to greatly enhance its reporting activities and adding more detailed insight into the company s performance.

6 About us: CXO Solutions is the provider of CXO-Cockpit, a Financial and Performance Reporting Platform founded in 2007 by a team of Finance and EPM professionals. Our goal is helping finance teams overcome the limits of Excel-based reporting processes and generic BI tooling. We help Finance teams all over the world to optimize their processes and unleash the full potential of their EPM systems. With financially intelligent connectors, integrated commentary and powerful process governance, our software ensures a true point of insight for fast decision making anytime, anywhere. With a global customer base of around 100 multinational corporations CXO is putting the power back into finance. TRY CXO-COCKPIT AT