Locations
Ambition
Cigna recognizes the importance of quality data for its external and internal reporting for both its business and its customers and has been taking steps to foster a truly data-driven culture throughout its entire organization. Enterprise performance management (EPM) tools are critical to this process. So, when Cigna went to modernize its EPM landscape, it took a comprehensive approach that would accelerate its digital transformation efforts.
The existing Oracle EPM landscape was vast and complicated, designed to meet the numerous financial reporting needs of Cigna’s global operations. More than 15 EPM applications were supporting planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and allocations for multiple users across countries. Multiple source systems fed data into these applications for monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports.
By streamlining planning and consolidation processes and increasing efficiency, Cigna hoped it could reduce close-cycle times and ensure that teams completed regulatory reports on time. A new automation-friendly approach to management reporting would also increase forecasting accuracy, enabling the business to cut costs and increase revenues.
Cigna knew that financial planning and consolidation processes would require constant monitoring to ensure successful data load and remediation of failures. Due to the criticality of the relevant business processes and strict time-to-market demands, Cigna also needed 24x7 vendor support to meet its strict SLAs.
Action
Wipro consultants developed multiple end-to-end automations for functions such as data loads, data extracts, data copy, and clear zero data. These automations eliminated manual interventions, improved accuracy, and saved time for both the business and IT. Wipro also worked with Cigna to develop new allocation processes and a solution for integrating newly acquired entities into the EPM landscape, enabling seamless data loads and faster close cycles.
Cigna partnered with Wipro to create a team capable of managing its Oracle EPM applications. Wipro implemented an onsite-offshore model with 24x7 support during the month-end and year-end close cycles and budget/forecast cycles to ensure zero downtime for the business.
Along with managing production operations, the Wipro team has taken complete ownership of knowledge management (maintaining and creating knowledge repositories and new SOPs) and status reporting. The team also participates in functional and performance application design and testing.
With strong program leadership in place, Cigna is now working with Wipro’s Managed Services EPM Support team to address additional business KPIs and further enable an IT ecosystem that maximizes business impact.
