This company is comprised of several lines of business and entities. Historically, they maintained eight individual ERP systems, each one highly customized. Transactional accounting occurred through 13 separate general ledgers, of which there were three different charts of accounts.  Each business unit acted independently and conducted financial planning and forecasting in a different manner; had different procurement processes; entered supplier and customer information in a dissimilar way; and controlled and accounted for projects and assets differently. This non-standard, complex and inefficient approach led to a month-end close process that took more than 13 days of around-the-clock effort. 
Within one year of implementing Oracle Cloud, the company has been able to move from a 13-day close cycle to 5 days. The company ruthlessly reviewed its CoA, going from 3,000 accounts to less than 500. It also implemented a shared services model in areas such as general accounting, project accounting, fixed asset accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, intercompany, business system and process support, and payroll accounting. This standardized model, on an ERP cloud with no customizations, helped the company to automate manual processes, decreasing the amount of human intervention and opportunity for error. This, in turn, has allowed the close to occur within business hours—eliminating the requirement for around-the-clock efforts.
The ease of taking numbers directly from a single cloud allows the FP&A teams to decrease the number of days required to prepare month end financial statements. This has resulted in greater reliance on and trust in the numbers by all parties.