Fragmented Finance Was Starting to Limit Scale
A leading student transportation provider operates one of the largest student transportation networks in North America, requiring precise coordination across workforce, fleet, and capital in a highly distributed environment.
Finance plays a central role in coordination. As the business scaled, it became clear that finance systems were not keeping pace.
Legacy on-premises Hyperion solutions, combined with spreadsheet-driven processes, made close and consolidation time-intensive and difficult to standardize. Planning operated in parallel silos, with revenue, workforce, and capital forecasts disconnected from each other.
The issue was not access to data. It was the ability to trust, align, and act on it quickly.
For a business operating at this scale, that gap started to create real constraints, slowing decision-making across workforce planning, fleet investment, and financial forecasting.
Choosing to Standardize, Not Patch
The company made a deliberate decision to address the issue at its source.
Rather than continuing to optimize individual processes, the company chose to standardize close and planning within a single environment. The objective was clear:
- Remove manual effort from the close parocess
- Align forecasting models across functions
- Establish a consistent, reliable data foundation across finance
This was not just a system upgrade. It was a shift toward running finance as a coordinated operation.
The client partnered with Perficient to implement Oracle EPM Cloud in support of that strategy.
Connecting Close and Planning in One Environment
The company modernized its close process using Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close, automating intercompany eliminations, currency translation, and cash flow reporting, while strengthening statutory reporting and close management discipline.
At the same time, the company redesigned planning using Oracle Planning. Financial, workforce, and capital models were brought together into a single, driver-driven framework.
This gave the FP&A team a centralized, standardized environment for budgeting and forecasting, directly linking revenue assumptions to workforce and fleet decisions.
With consolidation and planning operating on the same data foundation, manual reconciliation was eliminated, and reporting became consistent across the business.
Faster Close, More Confident Decisions
With a unified approach in place, finance now operates at the speed the business requires:
- Close loan run times reduced by 89%, accelerating reporting timelines
- Replaced Offline, Excel driven Budgeting with Cloud based, On-Demand Budgeting
- 60,000+ employees supported through aligned workforce planning, connecting labor decisions to financial targets
- Weekly, detail-based, driver-driven revenue forecasting, increasing responsiveness to change
- Consistent planning across finance, workforce, and capital, giving leadership a single view of performance
Automated data loads reduce manual effort, allowing finance to focus more time on analysis and decision support.
"The greatest impact we saw from working with Perficient was their ability to accelerate progress while elevating quality. Perficient helped us strengthen our internal capabilities, improve processes, and position ourselves for continued success."
— [Sr. Director Finance], Leading Student Transportation Provider
With close, no longer constrained, and planning aligned across functions, leadership can make decisions based on current performance, not delayed or fragmented data.
What This Signals
For large, asset-intensive organizations, scale exposes the limits of disconnected finance processes.
The company's approach reflects a different model, one where finance is designed as a connected system from the start. The result is faster reporting, more consistent forecasting, and better alignment between operational and financial decisions.
What’s Next
The company continues to expand its use of integrated planning, with a focus on scenario modeling across workforce and fleet, where better visibility can directly influence cost, service delivery, and long-term investment decisions.
