Four years ago, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International Inc launched an ambitious, multimillion-dollar effort to consolidate its financial accounting systems and create a centralized budget planning and forecasting system. It hasn't been easy, says Lisa Mullaney, former director of Chiquita's financial planning and analysis (FP&A) department, who guided the project through a number of challenges, including initial business-unit resistance, software bugs, delays and staffing shortages. One of the first decisions IT faced was whether to support the business performance management (BPM) infrastructure of about 40 servers internally or have Pinnacle host it. CIO Manjit Singh did agree to have Pinnacle host and maintain the system, but Chiquita purchased all of the hardware and software. Chiquita's BPM system went live as planned for budgeting on Sep 22, 2009, and now serves about 500 users worldwide. The new system provides financial and operational metrics that benefit not only FP&A but the business units as well.
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