Farewell to faxes and tables

Metso's Treasury enters Internet era

Trezone Internet application for cash management, reporting financing risks, hedging, and distributing information, will soon be in use in all parts of Metso. The experiences so far have been positive.

How to control the entire global cash flow of a corporation? How to avoid extra transaction costs? How to monitor in real-time the realization of financial risks affecting the company? What are the impacts of the realization of financing risks on the company''s result? How to improve the company's cash logistics?

Mikko Kilpinen, Vice President, Treasury Market Operations, Metso Corporation, airs some questions that if made five years ago, would have been laughed at. But that is not the case anymore - at least not in Metso.

"The Trezone system gathers, processes and distributes information efficiently, and in real-time. The first and foremost objective has been to develop cash management, reporting of financing risks and centralizing of internal hedging throughout the whole corporation. The system standardizes treasury and position reporting and creates a basis for group-wide treasury and risk management."

Services close to bank service quality

Trezone was taken in use in the beginning of June in over 30 Metso units in Finland. Financial functions of units in the US and Sweden are now entirely covered by the system, and the next step is Canada and the UK.

In its full capacity, Trezone will have over 200 users in Metso units all over the world. The system is accessible for use independently of time or place.

Metso units enter their financial information - such as cash flow estimate or hedging transactions - into the system. The reported figures are instantly analyzable and consolitated by field of activity or business area unit, and thereby available for management in charge. On a corporate-wide level the availability of financial information improves. In addition to people in charge of reporting, also other people requiring this information now have access to it.

"The biggest advantage is that we now have one standardized system in use. At the end of the week, when reporting solutions utilizing spreadsheets, e-mails and faxes would find their way to the headquarters, the treasury staff would have their hands full with manual work. The mixed system was slow, laborious, and gave rise to unnecessary costs."

"By centralized financial information, significant savings owing to netting of transactions and utilization of yield curve are achieved on the corporate level. At the same time, standardized cash flow prediction creates the opportunity for treasury department to utilize efficiently the cash flow logistics and interest rate trends. This way, the savings amount to about one million euros per year," Kilpinen reflects.

Appreciation from units

Thanks to the functionality of the new system, the financial department has already been at the receiving end of compliments from units. The importance of cash prediction for corporate management has been well understood, and on the other hand, the system has proven directly useful to the units, as well.

"The units have been able to internally utilize the information generated by the system. For example, the units have been interested in their own short-term liquidity. Work processes and contacts with corporate financing have become significantly easier."

Thanks to WAP technology, the units will soon be able to report via mobile terminals. The reliable internal system makes it possible for Metso''s sales representatives to acquire the relevant data on currency exchange rates even while out of the office.

"Trezone and its further developments will in the future enable for example managing the group''s entire cross-border payment exchanges in one and one place only. All the units need is one currency account. There are a lot of development choices available, and choosing between the alternatives is not necessarily easy. However, the technology already exists - all we need to do is choose our own system and put it to work," Kilpinen envisions.