Global Finance with multiple ERPs across countries
Running finance across several countries already creates complexity. At Essence, there was another layer: not every entity used the same ERP, and in some markets, local books were managed by external accounting firms working in their own systems.
Moving all of them onto one ERP meant cost, implementation work, and asking an outside service provider to learn a system they had not chosen and did not normally use.
“It’s very hard to force an external accounting firm to work in an ERP they don’t know and don’t want to use. They have their own systems. We tried it once, and it was a nightmare.”
So Katia was left with a reality many global finance teams know well: systems were going to stay different, but the numbers needed to come together.
Essence’s reporting is not simple. Essence works with components, bills of materials, and cost accounting, while management wants to analyze the business across different lines of business and segments. Its internal reporting is built around those specific needs rather than a standard reporting template, which meant considerable manual work for the finance team.
“We don’t build our P&L from a trial balance like a normal financial report. We take bits and pieces from everywhere, from different sources. Then we need to analyze the data by segment, and all that slicing creates a lot of work for everyone.”
With a lean finance team, taking that manual work out of the process became even more important.
Essence had previously implemented budgeting software with an Excel add-in. The functionality improved, but it meant waiting every time a number changed. Updates that should have been instant took seconds, or longer, to refresh.
Eventually, the team decided the software was slowing them down more than it was helping them.
“Every time you updated a number, you had to wait. Out of despair, we disconnected it and said, ‘Forget it, we’ll just go back to working in Excel.’”
The experience made speed and usability just as important as functionality and consolidation. Katia wanted automation, but not at the cost of making everyday finance work harder.
A Trusted Recommendation for FP&A in Manufacturing
Katia turned to PwC, a long-time advisor to Essence.
Instead of starting with a software shortlist, she started with the pain points. She walked them through the different systems, the manufacturing and FP&A requirements, and areas where manual work was taking the most time.
PwC knew Essence well enough to understand those challenges, while its work across many other companies gave it a broader view of the available solutions.
They know our company and our needs, but they also see many companies and many solutions. That’s their strength. I showed them where it hurt us most, and they said Datarails was where they thought we’d get the most value.
Katia compared the recommendation against independent reviews and, for good measure, even gave AI the same list of finance headaches to see what it came back with. Datarails remained among the top options she found.
After a demo, she was ready make a to move.
A System that Bridges the Gap
Datarails gave Essence a way to unify its finance data without forcing anyone to change systems they relied on.
Through FinanceOS, Datarails’ finance operating system, data from Essence’s different systems are connected, consolidated, and governed in one finance-ready foundation. Reporting, dashboards, planning, and analysis can all work from the same underlying data, even when individual entities continue operating in different systems.
For Katia, FinanceOS was the missing piece.
Datarails bridges that gap. We have different systems, and now I have one platform that brings them all together.
That foundation reflects the way Essence actually reports. Its P&L and management views do not follow an off-the-shelf structure, so building them in Datarails required understanding the logic behind the company’s existing process rather than simply recreating a standard template.
That is where Katia says the support from her Datarails customer success team stood out.
Our customer success manager is an absolute pro. Our needs are very specific, and he understood very quickly what we needed, even when the way we do something is different from the standard.
For Katia, the clearest impact has been the time the team gets back by eliminating the hours of manual work that used to happen before analysis could even begin.
Anyone who works in Excel knows that refreshing it, updating it every time, and making new versions every single time takes hours. That whole period of time is erased.
With those repetitive steps automated, finance gets into the numbers much sooner.
You arrive at the analysis phase much faster. That’s where you start discovering the errors, mistakes, and what the numbers are actually telling you.
Instead of spending the first part of the reporting cycle rebuilding and updating files, the team can start reviewing the numbers sooner, catch issues earlier, and spend more of their time understanding what needs attention.
Budgeting, Take Two
Essence is now building the infrastructure for its 2027 budget in Datarails, giving budgeting another shot after its previous platform sent the team scrambling back to Excel.
And Katia is already looking beyond core finance reporting. Logistics and procurement teams still run recurring analyses in Excel, and she sees an opportunity to automate those workflows and turn them into dashboards as well, using Datarails.
What started with a need to automate finance is giving Katia a foundation to modernize more of the work that still happens manually across the business.
For me, Datarails is a step forward technologically. I’m enjoying it very much, I’m excited about it.
