How Celanese Reduced Their Financial Planning Cycle From Weeks to Days

“With ENFOS, we have reduced our financial planning cycle time by 80 percent.” - Jeff Kirk, Director of Remediation at Celanese

It’s early 2007 and Celanese possesses one of the largest chemical remediation portfolios in the world. They’re also facing an issue they can’t afford to ignore - the wild, growing sprawl of their remediation data. Like many other companies at the time (and presently), the remediation team is finding themselves bogged down by issues of multiple currencies, version control, non‐uniform data standards, and the lack of a single, standardized system or database.

But right about then, something happens.
The Celanese remediation team takes a stand.

They take a proactive approach, refusing to settle for siloed piles of disparate data and the abundance of time spent on low-value-added tasks. They begin looking for a solution. They find one in ENFOS.

Remediation data management 2.0

As they begin to implement the ENFOS platform, Celanese migrates their reserve management operations over. Prior to the ENFOS implementation, the Celanese team had to manually reconcile their financial planning data with actual expenditures - a lengthy and often arduous process. What’s more, the flow of information to end-users was not on a real-time basis - this created gaps and exposure to cost overruns and non-supported decisions.

Bringing all their environmental liability data together on a shared platform and integrating it with their existing SAP systems allows Celanese to capture actual expenditures and charges on environmental projects, ensuring accurate and real-time reserve balances. The question “what happened to our projections?” is becoming rarer and rarer.

Soon thereafter, Celanese implements additional ENFOS functionality including document management, activity planning and scheduling, custom report builder, report scheduler and auto-report generation. They supplement that with Excel reporting templates and process management controls such as financial delegations of authority, automated next approvers, and the performance dashboard.

The results?

Celanese successfully transitions from a spreadsheet‐based financial planning and reserve/ARO management process to the ENFOS web‐based, centralized enterprise platform.

What’s changed?

• Many, many low-value-added tasks have been automated.
• Financial planning cycle time has been reduced by 80%.
• Much improved management control and transparency into portfolio performance
• Legacy systems and associated costs have been eliminated
• Level of effort for key financial planning has been greatly reduced

Finally, the Celanese remediation team have improved their competencies associated with project financial management and they are able to see, in real‐time, the impacts of decisions made regarding site strategy, work scope, actual expenditures, and future expected costs.

“We’ve implemented a global ENFOS solution which has drastically reduced the risks and manual accounting of all of Celanese’s asset retirement and environmental liabilities while increasing the reporting and analysis for our entire global portfolio.” - Jeff Schwertner, ARO and Environmental Accounting Manager, Celanese

Want to know more about how Celanese supercharged their remediation program? Check out detailed case study here: