JDE Company Consolidation

Good Morning,

I am new to JDE and the company I am with is working through consolidating multiple business units from being set up as separate companies in JDE to being consolidated into a single company with multiple branches. We've read the documentation and are working with the different internal stakeholders on what that looks like for us. We've been working with external consultants on the mechanics of the change. My query to you all is if you've done company consolidation what were some unexpected issues, and are there any best practices you can share from your experience? What were some other implications of moving from separate companies with their own branches to a consolidated company encompassing all the branches? If anyone has some experience with this I would appreciate your time, or if you can point me toward resources you've discovered.

Thank you,

Amanda Magalnik

@Amanda Magalnik There are two primary issues I remember from my multiple endeavors regarding Consolidation.

1. If you are having the companies to consolidate in multiple calendars then it gets very tough.
2. If you are using consolidation with companies in multi-currency mode, then rounding off variances are likely.

Off course, I oversimplified the issues but I am hoping those two are not relevant in your case from my basic understanding.

@Mark Dixon

Mark,

Thank you. We are looking at transferring balances for some new business units within the existing branch plants, but are so mired in the current branch plant structure with customizations that I'm not sure if that would be an option but I am going to field it to my team.

Thank you so much for your responses and your time.

@Amanda Magalnik

Amanda,
Yes we did attempt to use branch plants for a few of the many companies we acquired - well, business units really, not so much branch plants. But aside from a few set up files sounds similar.

However, we were acquiring so many companies at the time our organization was concerned about complexity. In hindsight, when one acquires companies one should be prepared for additional complexity. And the approach taken for those few examples was a bad idea since they were indeed separate legal entities, unlike in your case.

I think it was a bad idea to separate them out as separate companies originally, but it seems your company recognizes that now. Nevertheless, it would be a complex task due to the myriad locations of company number.

Have you considered closing the branch plants and moving to newly-opened companies, transferring the balances only? It would make historical inquiries difficult but not necessarily impossible.

@Mark Dixon
Mark,

Thank you for your feedback. Just some extra information on our effort. We are operating as a single legal entity, but instead of using a branch plant structure to handle the geographic separation within a single company the original setup used separate companies (all the same legal entity) with branch plants for each separate company. Have you had experience with a company consolidation similar to what we are looking at?

@Amanda Magalnik
Amanda,
I have worked on company consolidations in the past and can tell you it was very, very difficult - to the point where we pretty much cancelled the effort. There were some pretty complex conversions to nearly every ledger and many master tables, at least with the conversion plan they were considering for us.

We had a sister company that ran their own instance of JDE and they were obsessed with and proud of having only one JDE company, whereas we ran multiple. To this day I believe they jumped through more hoops to stay single entity than we did to manage multiple companies.

Multiple companies definitely has some overhead but JDE should allow you to run it pretty seamlessly if you set it up right. Automatic intercompany transactions, as an example, should make the company numbers less relevant to the casual or even most power users. Reporting in JDE is very multi-company friendly. For U.S. tax purposes (may not be relevant to you) it was easier to have separate companies for each legal entity.

I would ask what the driver is to go to a single entity for your company. If it's simplicity, it seems like a large effort for what might not be such a simple system.

These are my opinions based on experience and I expect it would not be hard to find someone who would vehemently disagree with me, but there it is.

@Amanda Magalnik , Welcome to the JDE community! You've joined a great ecosystem and a great company. I sent you a message in hopes we can connect and discuss further. I look forward to connecting with you!