Boosting group reporting efficiency at Golden Star Resources

Founded in 1984, Golden Star Resources is a gold mining company registered in Canada, with its corporate office in London and mine operations in Ghana, West Africa. Golden Star is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and the Ghanaian Stock Exchange. As of 2021, it has produced 155koz of gold.

Golden Star Resources required a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) system that would enable them to move away from the myriad of separate systems and supporting spreadsheets to a more robust, reliable and interactive system. The new solution needed to enable the team to improve efficiency and effectiveness of their group reporting and planning.

The challenge

The approach to financial reporting and analysis at GSR involved disparate systems, with supporting spreadsheets. Netsuite and Pronto are the main ERP systems, with a legacy consolidation model that was set up in Adaptive Insights. A combination of Excel and Workiva were also used to prepare the monthly, quarterly and annual reports. 

The key challenge for GSR was the amount of time and effort associated with validating the information, and the manual intervention required to produce their standard monthly reporting pack. There was no clear visibility of where the numbers originated, and how they straddled the fragmented systems.

GSR needed a system that could meet their core consolidation and reporting requirements whilst providing them with future proofed expansion capabilities to address their driver based planning, including top-down and bottom-up budgets and forecasts, and other specific areas like Life of Mine Planning and better KPI reporting.  

The solution

GSR began to look for a replacement solution to meet their requirements in early 2020. This was narrowed down to two key contenders, and following a detailed evaluation OneStream was selected with Concentric as the implementation Partner. 

The primary objectives of the OneStream project were as follows:

• Migrate to a modern CPM platform
  • Replace Adaptive and other fragmented elements of the reporting process with a more modern CPM platform that offers greater integration, process automation and governance 
  • Implement a user friendly, workflow-driven experience for end users

• Support core reporting processes
  • Preparation of Management and Statutory consolidated results
  • Support Quarterly Investor Report
  • Collection of budgets and forecasts for comparatives
• Support process efficiency
  • Create a foundation for future process improvement and automation
  • Align new system and processes with current state business structures and requirements
  • Allow for extension into other financial and operational reporting processes using the core platform e.g. life of mine planning.

Key benefits

• Streamlined financial reporting process.
• Improved data integration and validation.
• Confidence in numbers.
• 'Single version of the truth’.

The results

• A more efficient process enabling GSR to report consistently across the business. 
• Complete visibility across the close process.
• More confidence in the numbers produced, with improved data quality, and more automation of key tasks. 
• Increased productivity and efficiency as a result of the automaton of IFRS disclosure preparation.
• An environment where the users are capable of generating their own reports, a self-serve capability where GSR are confident that the numbers are correct. 
• Guided analysis and better insight into the business, with one central version of the ‘truth’. 

"Concentric exceeded our expectations in every way. They provided sound guidance and were knowledgeable about the system and wider accounting processes. They delivered on-time, within budget and were a joy to work with throughout the project." - Hardus Engelbrecht, VP Finance

"I have worked with other CPM systems, and whilst they met most of my requirements, there was a heavy demand on system maintenance, and report writing was complex and time consuming. The real benefit of OneStream is the unified platform, the automation, workflow and flexibility of the system, this has made my teams work more rewarding. With the guidance and support of Concentric in the set-up of the system, it has made my team more efficient and better equipped to respond to new reporting requirements." – Mark Navarro, Director of Reporting & Analysis

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