Shared Financial Services Centre now operating with greater swiftness, flexibility and effectiveness!

OSTRAVA – With new organizational arrangements of OKD's Accounting and Finance in place for six months we have begun to realise the first benefits due to the new centres in operation.

All activities of the Corporation eventually come to be expressed in the parlance of numbers

Finance does not comprise invoices and cash alone as it might appear at the first glance. The substance of the term also embraces a range of exacting professional activities taking care of generating correct and early information on OKD Corporation's results and financial stability, used by management and staff but also tapped by shareholders, investors, business partners and banks. OKD's financial results constitute a component part of the results of New World Resources Group, whose accounting and financial data are posted on the London, Warsaw and Prague stock exchanges.

Since 2009 the Financial Services Centre takes a comprehensive care of the areas of accounting, treasury (including administration of funds) and taxation. Thanks to bringing together well-qualified and experienced staff in the centre's sections, a new allocation of tasks, changes to labour organisation and the realisation of synergies thus produced the Centre today operates more efficiently than in 2008.

This is illustrated e.g., by the following indicators:

The quality of deliverables is checked based on world criteria:

Prior to publishing any information on OKD Corporation's results and financial situation, all data are verified, on a regular basis, by an international auditor so as to conform, in terms of both correctness and quality, to the world's best usage, requirements and criteria.

Modern programmes in use

In its activities the Centre is served by modern computer software tailored to information processing. This makes it possible to process all data efficiently, with any „manual intervention“ eliminated. The programme LIVELINK-ECM supporting electronic circulation of documents, introduced last year in addition to the well-known book-keeping and organisational system SAP, has eliminated the need of sending invoices for approval in hardcopy form. These programmes, now used on an international scale, have allowed OKD to adopt a more economical organisation of its finance-related activities.

We are unafraid of changes!

The Corporation is bent on enhancing its productivity. All these changes being applied to the book-keeping and financial systems at OKD aim to provide for a correct, faithful and honest representation of the Corporation's economic results and for correct and accurate payments of all charges and taxes.

Money-saving measures

The value of the Corporation's finances is being increased. Financial transactions are being optimised. In the treasury area the NWR Group of companies has implemented a system geared to optimising the utilisation of the entire NWR Group's funds. All these measures being taken in the treasury area are orientated towards a single objective, which is to maximise the security of payments and transactions and to minimise as far as possible the risks faced in the area of finance. Centralisation coupled with changes to the organisation of tasks has produced a marked enhancement of labour productivity, and the number of payment orders processed per employee has been doubled.

We have centralised cash-desk activities and employee deposit accounts

The number of booking-clerks working at the cash desks has dropped significantly. Following the changes to the organisation of tasks the number of documents per booking-clerk processed at the cash desks has been doubled. Employees' saving accounts are being serviced from a central location.

And what about taxation? We know how to deal with it

Thanks to centralisation achieved by clustering of staff in teams and also thanks to cooperation both among staff members and with the managers acting as guarantors of the various financial operations the issues of taxation now are being dealt with in unified fashion across the entire company. Much more time is devoted to controlling, thus mitigating the risks of miscalculated taxes and charges.

Continuous improvement – a programme also for finance?

Under the „Continuous Improvement“ programme the centres have set challenging tasks for themselves. These were actually met in full and, in some areas, even surpassed.

Where can you witness the results of the Centre's work?

The book-keeping and financial aspects of OKD Corporation's economic results are published i.a., on the website www.okd.cz, on its „Annual reports“ page. And a rather convincing aspect of the correct functioning of the centres, which is of interest to every employee, is the fact of having the wages and salaries credited on time to their personal accounts.

Vladimír Kostelný                                                       Jarmila Ivánková

Representative of FaPŘ – CSS Accounting              Representative of FaPŘ – CSS treasury & taxes