Fujitsu Works with Pacific Metals to Develop Integrated Accounting System

Fujitsu today announced that it has collaborated with Pacific Metals Co., Ltd., Asia's largest producer of ferronickel, to build a fully integrated accounting system for Pacific Metals which greatly improves the efficiency and accuracy of its corporate administration functions.

The new accounting system is built on an ICT platform that links Pacific Metals's operations control system with a sales, order and inspection system, using the Fujitsu GLOVIA smart accounting solution and Fujitsu Interstage Information Integrator for data collection and consolidation. Using Interstage Information Integrator to define the series of processes involved in collecting and tabulating accounting data enables the system to handle what previously had required the individual know-how of specialists, allowing accounting processes to be executed with much greater efficiency and precision.

Background

Pacific Metals is Asia's largest, and the world's third-largest, producer of ferronickel, a nickel-iron alloy that is the principal component of stainless steel. In the highly competitive steel market, companies are always looking for ways to strengthen their fundamentals through the use of ICT. Until now, Pacific Metals relied on a limited number of specialists in its accounting department to handle the tasks of collecting and tabulating data from each department, which increased the workload required to produce general tabulations of total expenses. It also created challenges in terms of quickly compiling periodic earnings and settlement reports and managing internal compliance.

Pacific Metals decided to address these issues by creating a new system framework that would also provide the flexibility to accommodate future changes in administration and accounting items. The company worked with Fujitsu to build a new system that tied together GLOVIA smart accounting software with Interstage Information Integrator, software released in April 2009 that collects data from all of a company's various business systems, converts it into a usable format, and aggregates and tabulates it for redistribution.

The new system makes use of Interstage Information Integrator's design sheet (*1) and plug-in (*2) features, so that staff from the production, support, and personnel departments can compile and tabulate data for monthly reports and wage data, tasks that previously had been performed by the accounting department. This was done by formalizing the processes and know-how that were previously part of the individual skill sets of a few experts and embedding them as functions in the system.

Because this dramatically reduces the effort involved for each department compiling data in terms of entering and double-checking it, it was possible to set up settlement processes for each department that allowed sufficient time for verification. For example, the amount of time required to produce a general tabulation of total expenses, which previously had taken about one day, has been reduced to about 90 minutes. The process of producing monthly earnings and settlement reports has likewise been shortened by about three days. The system also has the flexibility to accommodate changes to business processes or accounting items by changing functions in a Microsoft Excel-based design sheet, obviating the need for systems engineers for maintenance and cutting operating costs.

Starting in 2008, Pacific Metals began efforts to make visible the processes involved in its administration and internal compliance, ahead of its competition, and the revamp of its accounting system has been one of the steps in that process. The company plans to augment its accounting system with additional functionality to further increase its competitiveness, and Fujitsu looks forward to assisting with its end-to-end set of ICT services, from consulting and IT deployment to operations and maintenance.