Masterfile Management

One Dataset, Many Hierarchies, Dramatic Gains

Our Client

Our client ranks among the world’s leading energy companies, developing technologies across the energy portfolio from oil and gas to solar and wind. Its 40,000 employees operate in about 100 countries.

The Background

The client’s financial analysts had better things to do. On a regular basis, however, they reconciled data from tens of thousands of cost centers across the company, then translated those data into reports for tax and financial authorities. Automating even part of this task would free them to pursue more value-added activities, but the client could not spare the internal IT resources to develop a solution. Hence the call went out to Blue Slate.

The initial scope of work called for Blue Slate to simply populate the reporting hierarchies (tax returns, 10-Ks, country reports, etc.) and load the data. The Blue Slate team, however, saw an opportunity to take the system to the next level of automation—and meet the client’s requirements more fully.

The Challenge

Key to this opportunity was the creation and management of a single masterfile that would automatically reconfigure the data into the required reporting hierarchies. The challenge was to build such a masterfile where none had ever existed.

The Blue Slate Solution

At the start, Blue Slate created a customized team whose members had experience in the client’s tax, finance, and data management areas, as well as in data analysis and architecture. Noting that even the leading systems only worked with one hierarchy at a time, team members designed an enterprise-wide, web-based solution that tied the data to n hierarchies without any extra code or tables. In the process, they generalized the data structure to work across hierarchies, incorporated extra data feeds, added reporting capabilities, and automated frequent queries. Over time, the team also developed a series of applications for tax optimization.

This solution provides considerable flexibility in a constantly shifting environment. If a regulatory change calls for a new hierarchy, for example, the client can add it in one place only, reducing the internal time spent on loading multiple copies.

The results were dramatic. The system achieved new levels of accuracy. The client enjoyed a substantial reduction in tax liability and major productivity gains, as it reassigned analysts to tasks that made best use of their full expertise. Perhaps the clearest sign of client satisfaction, though, lies in the ongoing relationship: for the past several years, Blue Slate has generated the client’s tax returns and even defended the financials before auditors.