Midsize Business Brief

/ Cinemark Brazil
Theatre Operator Debuts Integrated Financial Solution to Rave Reviews

Story at a Glance

Cinemark Brazil’s marquee lights up more theatres in urban shopping centers than any other movie exhibitor in the country. Solange Almeida would like to go to the movies more often, but as the company’s IT Director she often works late trying to align her technology projects with business goals. She chose Microsoft Dynamics® AX to replace the company’s aging business management system and to help her prove compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Today, finance employeeshave reduced month-end closing by two days and are savingsome hours a day reconciling data.

Aging Business Management System

When Solange Almeida watches the latest romance, she remembers the beginnings of the company twelve years ago when she was the second employee hired. Since then, the market has grown, especially for affluent young people, and Almeida has become the IT Director. Today, she uses her in-depth company knowledge to make the best IT decisions to help Cinemark Brazil employees work more productively.

Recently, Almeida decided to replace the Cinemark Brazil’s aging enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Solomon Software. “I saw the difficulty the finance department had closing the books on time every month,” she says. “We have to provide accurate, balanced figures to headquarters in Dallas, Texas, on the fifth day of the next month. People worked weekends, manually consolidating and verifying data from our two point-of-sale (POS) systems. Other manual processes, such as performing daily bank reconciliations by checking paper deposit slips against bank records, wasted more than three hours a day.”

Neither of the two POS systems was compatible with the ERP system, forcing staff members to export the data into the ERP solution so that data could be sent to Dallas on time. This became an issue when Cinemark Brazil was asked to prove compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). “Head office asked for more transparency in our financial processes, and while we complied with their request, Solomon was definitely not SOX compliant,” says Almeida. “I had no event log and no information about what screens users accessed and when.”

Managers wanted a better tool to analyze POS information, but extracting information from Solomon into Microsoft® Office Excel® spreadsheets was difficult. Often, Almeida relied on theatre managers to send information so that people could manipulate the data on their own. “With no central place to store financial data, we were forced into manual workarounds,” says Almeida. “The problem only got worse as the company grew and the number of people in the finance department remained the same.”

User-Friendly, Flexible Management System

Almeida addressed these issues by standardizing on one POS system and deploying Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition database software to consolidate financial and sales information. “When our partner Systems Advisers Group showed us Microsoft Dynamics® AX, we liked it immediately,” she says. “Our Controller, Sergio Fernandes, said that it looked so familiar, he wouldn’t need to train his staff. I was happy because it would integrate with our POS and data warehouse solutions.”

Almeida asked Systems Advisers Group to demonstrate the product for Fernandes and the Vice President of Cinemark Brazil. Then Fernandes showed the solution to the 12members of the finance department. From the outset, Almeida encouraged the finance department to use this opportunity to improve their processes. “The Microsoft business management solution was so flexible that it accommodated our business processes with ease,” she says. “Our old system had been customized, yet with our new system we didn’t have to change a thing.”

Automated Efficiency

For Almeida, it was gratifying to see how quickly employees in the finance department adopted the new solution. Soon she saw improvements in financial operations, performance management, and risk management. “Microsoft Dynamics automates processes we never even tried to achieve with our previous solution,” she says. “Today, no one has to manually reconcile bank statements or work weekends to close the books. The solution is easier to support because it integrates with our Microsoft infrastructure, which opens up possibilities for extending the platform. We are planning on automating purchasing workflows using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and financial data from Microsoft Dynamics AX.”

It’s easier for Almeida to prove that financial processes comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The system generates an activity log and she can assign roles-based access to different screens. As the solution integrates with the database, Almeida can export POS data into Microsoft Dynamics AX, where the reporting functionality delivers valuable data such as concession sales and attendance by film and location.

For Almeida, the success of a new technology rollout is measured by the reviews it receives— just like the movies. According to Fernandes, Microsoft Dynamics AX has been a hit with his department.

Lessons Learned

  • Ensure a business manager evangelizes the project.
  • Set expectations for IT’s support role.
  • Have users re-evaluate work processes before deployment.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2008

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