Acquisitions make life difficult for the people working withinthe company doing the acquiring, particularly for a global companythat deals with different languages and currencies. CunninghamLindsey is just such a firm.

Operating in more than 50 countries, Cunningham Lindsey is aloss adjusting and claims management firm and many of the differententities came together as part of a series of acquisitions.

One of the issues was cash management—which Cunningham Lindseywas doing via Excel—and some cash forecasting from various entitiesthat didn't have any balance reporting on a regular basis, explainsElizabeth Ecsy, director of treasury for Cunningham Lindsey.

"It was important that we get a handle on cash balances," saysEcsy.

The first step was to expand the spreadsheets as the businessgrew. Cunningham Lindsey consolidated all 50-plus cash forecasts onExcel on a weekly basis, according to Ecsy, which meant a lot ofcopy and pasting going on and less than timely information.

"We were getting information from Excel, but some of theinformation was a week old when we got is, which meant some of theforecasts were outdated," she says.

At the same time, the company also put together working capitalagreements and set up a manual pooling arrangement in London with ahalf-dozen different currencies.

"We had to get to the point where we had weekly funding and moreof a consistent push of cash," says Ecsy.

Cunningham found the software provider Kyriba offered theeasiest solution to implement. There were other options, but Ecsyfelt Kyriba was a better fit because it is a web-based service andthe solution provider houses the solution in the cloud.

"We don't have a lot of IT infrastructure in place," says Ecsy."Also, we couldn't have an installed solution in 50 countries.Having everyone log in and loading information from our differentbanks was something that definitely was a high point for Kyriba andour future together.

Operating in the cloud has worked well, adds Ecsy.

"We already did some cloud services, so our IT director feltthis was a safe way to go and the way of the future," she says."The biggest part was making sure that everyone was able to accessthe information. Using a cloud solution wasn't too much of aconcern. We don't have to save all the information on our servers;it's saved on the Kyriba servers with a disaster recoveryplan."

Cunningham Lindsey went online with the Kyribasolution shortly before its second group of acquisitions. The firstand largest acquisition happened in 2009 and Ecsy explains therewas quite a bit of time for Cunningham Lindsey to establish a newcorporate culture.

"We had communication with everyone and where we were headed,"she says. "It took the CEOs getting together for budget meetingsand they sat in our office in Tampa and learned how the strategyworked, where our businesses overlap, and where we can help eachother. Realizing we are part of one corporate culture and not ourown silo has been a huge help in achieving our goals. 2011 and 2012were good years for us from a cash management perspective as wewere able to meet some debt goal that we were otherwise notexpected to meet."

The companies that were part of the first set of acquisitionsoperated under a stricter cash management perspective thanCunningham Lindsey did, explains Ecsy. Since those companies movedcash in a different way, Ecsy adds that it was difficult toconvince them to change the way they operated.

"It took a push from our global CEO and CFO to get the ideaacross that we are using a program management system and they hadto comply with it," she says. "They also had to get their banksreporting. If they were not with a bank doing reporting via Swiftthen they had to change banks. Honestly, that was the mostdifficult part for us because we needed to have global cashvisibility."

Today, about 85 percent of Cunningham Lindsey's cash is beingreporting directly from the banks, according to Ecsy.

There was some grumbling among the different entities, pointsout Ecsy.

"Nobody likes change," she says. "I don't like it either. Theywere going from the Excel environment—and people really likeExcel—where they can work on their laptop. There's more workinvolved with the Kyriba solution, but we spent a lot of timeconsolidating the forecasts from Excel—eight to 10 hours a weekputting these forecasts together. Now we're able to use that timeto analyze the results and see what people are doing and where wecan move money. I think that has made things better all the wayaround."

Having a global company, Cunningham Lindsey trained its peoplevia WebEx. The company also had to pull in different people totrain people in various languages—including Chinese.

"It was a lot of work, but it was great to connect witheveryone," says Ecsy. "We worked with their forecasts and showedthem how to pull their information. It worked for us."

The Kyriba system has produced great results, explains Ecsy.

"I can see what the receivables are in Malaysia today and whatthey did yesterday and whatever else is going on," says Ecsy. "Wehave a much better touch and feel with what is going on within thecompanies. I don't have to send an email to find out information; Ican find it myself."

Cunningham Lindsey also has been able to produce better cashforecasts.

"We've been able to extrapolate information from the prior year,pull it into this year and see if it is fairly consistent or we canchange it by percentages to make it accurate for this year'sforecasts," says Ecsy. "We are able to see our cash requirements ona day-to-day basis. People are updating things daily. We have muchmore success and Kyriba has been a big part of that. There are somegreat things that have come about from this. We're developing aglobal GL and having the banks reporting means it will be easier toflip the switch on the entities when we go live."