FIJI Water Improves Financial Reports

Since 1996, FIJI Water (www.fijiwater.com) has bottled natural artesian water from the remote Yaqara valley of the Fiji islands. Today, FIJI Water is the top imported bottled water choice in the United States -- and the only major brand that comes from an artesian source. Acquired in 2004 by Roll International, a $2-billion company with 4,000-plus employees, FIJI Water gained seven sister companies, including POM Wonderful, Teleflora and Paramount Citrus, and now has 600 employees. After its acquisition, FIJI Water installed a business suite, which is used by Roll International’s other businesses. Quickly, FIJI Water’s finance and accounting group found that standard reporting tools did not support easy consolidation of financial statements from the company’s various international businesses. 

Standard Reporting a “Painful” Challenge

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., FIJI Water consists of 15 legal entities operating around the world. These entities are represented by 15 sets of books, each with a distinct company number, meaning monthly financial reports require consolidation of balance sheets and profit and loss (P&L) statements. From 2004 to 2006, FIJI Water’s Finance group relied on standard reporting tools. According to Armando Sepulveda, financial planning and analysis director at FIJI Water, the initial two years using these standard reports were “very painful” for his group.

“The standard reporting tools did not provide the details Finance needed, but instead gave us just the raw data from various sources for the different business entities, which we’d then have to consolidate in Excel,” explained Sepulveda. “Also, the standard reports didn’t have a good drill down option that let us analyze the source of variances or explore specific details. If questions arose, we had to request additional customization from the information technology (IT) team – a complicated and time consuming process.”

Excel-Based Tool Empowers Finance Group

In 2006, the Finance group began the search for a tool that could expedite its monthly financial reporting while providing richer insight into FIJI Water’s business performance. Enterprise-class tools were deemed too costly, but after hearing of GL Wand, an Excel-based financial reporting tool, from a sister company within Roll International, Finance requested a demo. After a free 30-day trial of GL Wand, business and finance users determined it was a tool that met their requirements, both in terms of functionality and price point.

“With GL Wand, we saw that our financial analysts would have the ability to customize and run their own financial reports without IT’s assistance, as well as drill down all the way to the sub-ledger level to better understand drivers for costs and expenses in our businesses,” said Sepulveda. “Not only would GL Wand’s direct link to Oracle data allow us to easily consolidate the information, it provided easy access to details that we’d never had before.”

Over a period of about three months after GL Wand’s installation, which required no data warehouse or additional hardware, Sepulveda designed GL Wand reports to meet the needs of FIJI Water’s operations team. The reports include those reviewed on a monthly basis for the different cost centers, departments and functions that manage a budget, as well as sales reporting for various regions in the United States and internationally.

Training finance users on GL Wand was also quite easy, according to Sepulveda, who could easily demonstrate how to drill down and make changes to the reports -- without calling IT. “Our financial analysts are very familiar with Excel, so working in GL Wand was a smooth transition for them,” he said.

Doing More with Less Taps Company Expertise

FIJI Water’s Finance group currently uses GL Wand to create the majority of its financial reports. According to Peter Gaidis, corporate controller at FIJI Water, GL Wand has significantly expedited reporting processes and improved report quality. 

“Not only has GL Wand empowered our Finance team by allowing them to create and modify their own reports, our month end closing process has gone from 10 to 15 days to just five business days with GL Wand, and accuracy has improved to a more granular level,” Gaidis described.

As a specific example of improved accuracy, Gaidis points to accrual processes, where GL Wand’s ability to drill down into sub-ledgers in real time has alleviated the need for employees to maintain separate invoice files. “We can see accounts payable sub-ledgers, so there is no need for people to duplicate effort by tracking invoices,” Gaidis said.

 Because the Finance group can create reports so efficiently, they are able to support more internal customers without requiring additional resources. The group now assists managers at multiple levels in a variety of departments -- sales, logistics, manufacturing, marketing, IT and more.

“Since we installed GL Wand, the Finance team has gone from four analysts supporting seven people at the vice president/director level to seven analysts supporting close to 50 people, including those in managerial and supervisory roles,” said Sepulveda. “We can quickly respond to their requests for additional information, which really empowers managers at all levels to control costs and allows the company to tap into insight and expertise at all levels. This capability has been a real cost savings for the company.” 

GL Wand also greatly simplifies the creation of consolidated financial reports with balance sheets and income statements from the various FIJI Water business entities. The Finance team has created reports that show separate results for each legal entity on the same page. In addition, GL Wand assists with the translation of currencies for various entities, which is important for FIJI Water’s many international subsidiaries.

“We use GL Wand to review translated GL currency results by business entity to ensure everything looks fine before we actually run the consolidation in Oracle,” Sepulveda said. “In the past, if there was a problem with the translation process, we would have to undo the consolidation and then reconsolidate -- a very tedious process. With GL Wand, we first run the reports in US dollars to make sure the translation is correct. It's also helpful from an audit standpoint to provide reports in both local currency and US dollars for the auditors so they can continually recalculate the translations.” 

FIJI Water is committed to quality and excellence in its product, people, profitability and strategic partners.  Now, employees around the world are empowered to make better business decisions in order to support that commitment.