Thermadyne Industries, Inc., headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is a multinational manufacturer of welding and cutting products. Thermadyne is comprised of long-standing market leading companies representing many of the most respected brand names in the welding and metal fabricating industry.
Challenge
Thermadyne recognized a need to proactively manage budget initiatives that could enhance the overall value of its business. The company’s capability to grow, both organically and externally, needed to be supported by a budgeting solution that was flexible and scalable. The manually intensive budgeting process, inefficient spreadsheet-based budgeting tools, and limited capability to provide “what if” forecasting presented a significant obstacle to future growth.
Solution Deployed
Thermadyne turned to Oracle’s EPM product suite in order to attain “world class” budgeting and forecasting capabilities. The strategy was simple – replace a large number of manually created spreadsheets with an integrated and secure budgeting and forecasting system. Perficient and Oracle Hyperion Planning were selected to provide the solution to Thermadyne’s budgeting challenges.
Unique to this effort was a challenge to implement a cost-effective, rapid deployment of a topdown P&L budgeting solution to assist with critical budgeting and forecasting business requirements which required fulfillment before year end. The Oracle EPM budgeting solution provides Thermadyne with a scalable, Excel-like tool with native web capabilities, a central data repository for budgeting and forecasting, a corporate model that captures and aggregates business unit budgets and forecasts, the ability to capture scenario assumptions, summary-level driver-based inputs to support “what if” scenarios, and the ability to capture high-level adjustments to augment or override budgeting and forecasting assumptions.
The investment by Thermadyne was nominal while the payback will be substantial since a strong solution architecture foundation has been created to support future business growth and cost/profitability objectives.
Business Value Delivered
- Reduces budgeting and forecasting effort and cycle time
- Delivers a secure, dedicated database for enterprise-wide budgeting initiatives
- Enables the creation of multiple budgeting scenarios based upon assumptions