Since medical technology manufacturer VIASYS spun off from Thermo Electron Corp. five years ago, its organizational structure has been in a state of constant change. VIASYS has relied heavily on its financial consolidation and reporting software to keep performance moving in the right direction and make smart decisions about acquisitions and divestitures.

BPM Magazine: Could you describe the software VIASYS uses to support performance management?

John Imperato: Sure. But first let me give you a little background to help you understand our evolution. When VIASYS was spun out from Thermo Electron in November of 2001, we took control of 25 separate entities that they had acquired over the years. They were all somewhat linked to the health care medical technology industry, but they were totally autonomous of each other. So what we've been doing over the last five years is taking these 25 companies and molding them and adding and deleting in a way that has left us with the VIASYS that we have today. We are now a coherent company with four main business segments, but because of this heritage we still find ourselves managing the company with different financial systems in every one of our reporting entities.

One of the very first decisions that we made in our first year of operations was that we couldn't run the company the way we needed to using the financial software that we inherited. What we received from Thermo was a simple consolidation system that provided us with very little data. It strictly provided legal-entity reporting: nothing below a summary P&L and balance sheet; no drilldown capability; no ability to deal with foreign currency, tax, or other important data. The system didn't even provide monthly reporting capability. At the end of 2001, we made a decision to put in a new consolidation system that would give us more of the information that we needed to manage the business.

We manage our company today, for the most part, with Cartesis Finance as our consolidation package and for our central reporting. We are currently rolling out a global ERP system, JD Edwards, across the entire company, which will eventually give us a single instance and, therefore, a common platform and a common chart of accounts across the globe. This is a major, major step for us.

BPM: So, with all of the different entities that are part of VIASYS, do you now report on metrics across the company to monitor financial performance?

Imperato: We do. In all of our entities, we have automatic updates from the local general ledger systems into Cartesis Finance. All of our systems have flat files that are extracted and then mapped into it. We collect this information on a monthly basis, and we report on a strategic business unit [SBU] basis. The four SBUs that we operate under are respiratory care, neurocare, medical systems, and orthopedics. But we may have 20 or more legal entities supporting those SBUs. For example, our German affiliate has respiratory, neurocare, and med systems activity. Cartesis Finance will take all of the information from this entity, along with all of our other companies, and at the end of the process give us a respiratory care P&L, a neurocare P&L, and so on. The respiratory care business P&L, for example, could have its foundation in many different legal entities.