The International Cricket Council Improves Financial Management with Epicor

Dubai-based International Cricket Council (ICC) implemented the Epicor iScala financial management suite to streamline accounting and reporting processes seamlessly at a time of rapid expansion in activities.

ICC Challenges

The International Cricket Council (ICC) is the international governing body for cricket and its official charter includes promotion and protection of the game and to optimize its commercial rights and properties for the benefit of its members and stakeholders. The ICC was founded as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 by representatives from England, Australia and South Africa.

Renamed the ICC in 1965, the organization currently has 10 full members, 33 associate members and 58 affiliate members. From its formation, Lord’s Cricket Ground was its home but in pursuit of optimizing commercial benefits the ICC moved its commercial and financial base to Monaco in 2001. However, the disadvantages of 3 split offices drove the ICC to look for a new location, and in 2005 it shifted its headquarters to Dubai. The move to Dubai also came at a time when the ICC was on a rapid growth phase.

“We began with a basic accounting system in 1999 that worked well given our limited needs at the time. But, 2000 was a watershed year for us – we went through a paradigm shift in the way we work. Until then, our mode of operation was to delegate work to host countries of the game, but this underwent a fundamental change with the ICC assuming more direct responsibility,” said Faisal Hasnain, chief financial officer of the ICC.

The cricket body was also in the process of making significant changes to its business structure. “The ICC introduced a proper corporate structure in 2000 and we were expanding on all fronts including staff strength, hiring professional and qualified staff. There was significant increase in commercial revenues too,” he said.

This was the first time the ICC realized that a basic accounting system could not cope with its needs. The problem was compounded with the fact that the system in use was not scalable, which led to a logjam in the flow of business processes. The rapid growth of the organization demanded easy financial reporting, and the automation and streamlining of activities to provide end-to-end visibility that would in turn help optimize resource use and reduce redundancies.

The system that the ICC was using fell well short of these needs and was not responsive to the growth needs. At that time the ICC had to take into account activities of its three offices in London and in Monaco.

“Two years ago, we realized the dire need for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that could cope well with our operation, and this is when Epicor was introduced to us by Scan Technology, Epicor’s channel partner in the Middle East," Hasnain said.

From Epicor, what we needed was consolidation of all our activities for seamless visibility and we are glad now that we have found the right ERP partner. Epicor has been live, scalable and a user-friendly solution which brings the advantage of single-window monitoring of all activities. We can also drill down to each activity for a detailed picture, bringing more agility to our business,” said Hasnain.

The ICC started implementing Epicor iScala in December 2006 and the installation was completed in May 2007. The four-month implementation was preceded by a two-week assessment of the needs of the ICC through a series of meetings with department heads and key officials.

Reaping the Benefits of Improved Control

“Report generation was a laborious exercise before we implemented Epicor. The flexibility that Epicor brings, coupled with firm control over the funds and its deployment has made us more responsive to critical needs of the organization with priority in sight,” said Hasnain.

The ICC has also been reaping the rewards of higher productivity and efficient use of resources at a time of exponential growth in its activities and expansion in its role in line with the growth of the game to newer markets. Prior to implementing Epicor, the ICC’s control over its activities and efficiency levels to monitor each of the process was limited and handicapped.

Hasnain said Epicor has given a fresh facet to its corporate reporting standards. “We can vouch that the improvement has been remarkable and compared to our investment, the returns are very significant. The robust and extensive information sharing capabilities of the Epicor solution, plus the drill-down capability has helped us manage our activities better,” he added.

Elaborating on the benefits, Hasnain said overall time saved by the ICC on all of its business processes improved tremendously. “The benefits have been across the board—a marked improvement in report generation, user-friendliness, information storage and in the case of budgeting, Epicor allows us to forecast and compare on our budget base.

He said that advanced features in Epicor iScala for report generation have helped the ICC improve efficiency by 50 to 60 percent, which has led to time and cost savings. Today, report generation at the ICC is mostly automated, real-time and online resulting in tremendous reduction in time and duplication costs.

The impact of the implementation has not just been on routine activities like payment processes and standard bookkeeping work, but has resulted in a transformation of the financial analysis and planning process at the ICC. A key tool here has been the availability of 10 accounting dimensions in iScala. In one view, ICC management are now able to view financial implications of various aspects of the business resulting in better and more effective financial and business planning as well as major savings through a much more efficient and near automated process.

Hasnian said prior to implementing Epicor, many processes and reports were manually managed and would consume a lot of time – and in some cases instead of days with Epicor some processes and report preparation time has been reduced to just a matter of a few hours.

Establishing a Long-Term Partnership

The decision to go with Epicor was based on a long-term perspective, where scalability of the solution will come to benefit the organization. “It is important that we have a solution that can grow with us. The ICC is going through a dynamic phase now and we are confident that the Epicor solution will scale as we grow. With Epicor we can build modules around it, and this is imperative during the time of growth in any organization,” Hasnain said.

Apart from the strength of the Epicor solution, Scan Technology also provided the ICC with dedicated training representatives ensuring staff use the system – training is a continuous exercise for key members of the ICC staff. The ICC has implemented the Epicor financial management module so far, and plans to implement Active Planner in the future to add further value to its ERP base.

About Epicor

Epicor is a leading provider of enterprise business software solutions to the midmarket and divisions of Global 1000 companies. Founded in 1984, Epicor serves over 20,000 customers in more than 140 countries, providing solutions in over 30 languages. Epicor’s Middle East HQ is based in Dubai. For more information, please go to http://www.epicor.com.