Building the Future of Finance at Travis Perkins

As a leading partner to the construction industry, and the UK’s largest distributor of materials to the building industry for thousands of customers across the UK, Travis Perkins is determined to create a finance function proofed and perfected to drive the future of its business.

From the start we had a clear vision: we wanted to create a leading-edge finance system that would modernise our processes and controls, help us standardise and improve our finance processes across the Group to improve the way we work and set the organisation up to meet the regulatory and commercial challenges of the future.

More specifically, we wanted to fundamentally transform how our finance team works and supports the rest of business moving forward. To ensure that our colleagues would always be armed with the most accurate information possible, in a timely manner, to enable better decision-making.

Many of our processes are manual and time-consuming. For example, teams must format and prepare datasets before they are suitable for use. Automating more of these would enable finance to focus more time on strategic, mission-critical activities.

Finance isn’t in a position to fully live up to our goals of delivering the kind of efficiencies and agility our Group now requires. We want to enable finance to help the business spend more time looking forward instead of backwards; and help drive the business decisions that will help enable and deliver the strategic future of Travis Perkins.

Other factors, such as future compliance, also require consideration. With an ever-changing landscape of stringent regulatory controls, we need to ensure we are fully and appropriately positioned to deal with that by implementing world-class, cloud-based solutions that allow us to stay ahead of the game.

Having determined that we wanted to work with leading industry names to achieve our goals and to tap into the latest thinking, processes, capabilities, and technologies, we began a rigorous, RFP process.

One alliance really stood out: Oracle and Hitachi Vantara

When it came to the Hitachi team, it felt from the outset like a great cultural fit.  The proposals they put forward demonstrated a clear understanding of our business and its needs. We also felt that their iterative, agile approach to delivery would enable a greater certainty and peace of mind about the quality the programme would deliver, and the ultimate suitability of the solution.

Oracle’s offering (Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), – and its stock valuation technology in particular – was a key part in our decision too. This solution will give us a complete view of our business.  Information will be available at a click of a button, instead of spending hours to collect data manually. With more agile and accurate information, we will have better insights across the entire Group and be able to spend more time on forecasting and strategic decision-making.

As we move forward with our transformation, there is a very real sense of partnership with Hitachi and Oracle, and we’re excited about working together to build a solid, reliable foundation for the future of finance here at Travis Perkins.

Helen Taylor-Walsh is the Finance Transformation Technology Director, Travis Perkins plc.

 Jane Morrison is Director of Finance Transformation, Travis Perkins plc