Pipelines of Precision: Transforming Finance Master Data Governance
A leading midstream energy enterprise in North America operates one of the largest pipeline networks in the region, transporting crude oil, natural gas, and refined products with safety, reliability, and efficiency. Its infrastructure supports industries, communities, and cities, ensuring a continuous flow of essential resources. The company is among the top six on Fortune’s Energy Sector Leaders list. With decades of operational excellence and a strong emphasis on sustainability, the organization is widely regarded as a benchmark for reliability and performance in the energy sector.
As the organization’s operations expanded and financial activities grew in complexity, challenges in maintaining accurate, consistent, and controlled finance master data began to surface. Manual creation processes, regional process variations, and fragmented governance practices made standardization and oversight difficult across subsidiaries. To address these challenges and establish a unified, scalable framework for finance data management, the organization partnered with Cherrywork Suite of Digital Solutions from Incture, enabling a more automated, governed, and transparent approach to finance master data governance.
As the organization expanded across multiple subsidiaries, the creation and migration of cost and profit centers became increasingly critical to maintaining accurate financial reporting and operational oversight. Profit centers, representing distinct business units or revenue-generating segments, are essential for tracking performance, allocating budgets, and measuring profitability. When these data sets had to be created or migrated in bulk manually, multiple challenges arose. Each entry required careful verification to ensure alignment with organizational standards, creating a time-intensive process that demanded significant human effort and coordination.
Manual bulk processes often required repetitive checks, cross-system reconciliations, and approvals across subsidiaries, which could slow down financial workflows. Delays in processing bulk entries made it challenging to provide timely visibility into financial performance and limited the organization’s ability to make proactive decisions regarding cost allocation, profitability analysis, or strategic investments. Variations in local practices or standards further complicated the process, as harmonizing data across regions required additional validation and oversight. From a business perspective, an efficient, centralized, and standardized approach was essential to accelerate bulk creation and migration, maintain consistency, reduce reconciliation efforts, and ensure that financial planning and reporting remained reliable and actionable across the enterprise.
The manual and time-intensive processes for creating and migrating cost and profit centers were optimized through the implementation of Cherrywork Finance Master Data Governance. Bulk uploads were automated, enabling large volumes of cost and profit center data to be processed efficiently and consistently across subsidiaries. Configurable workflows and embedded business rules ensured that each record adhered to governance standards, while approvals and validations were seamlessly integrated, providing clear accountability at every stage.
Potential inconsistencies and duplications were identified proactively through integrated risk management, preventing issues from affecting downstream operations. Real-time access to accurate finance master data supported informed
decision-making, timely reporting, and reliable financial management. As a result, operational bottlenecks were reduced, manual effort was minimized, and the organization gained a scalable, governed, and insight-driven approach to managing cost and profit center data.
The implementation of Cherrywork Finance Master Data Governance delivered measurable improvements in managing cost and profit centers. Bulk creation and migration of financial master data were completed 3× faster, reducing manual effort and optimizing operational efficiency. Governance-enabled workflows minimized errors and ensured consistent adherence to organizational standards, while integrated risk management eliminated duplications and inconsistencies across subsidiaries.
End-to-end visibility into finance master data was established, supporting 90% faster bulk cost and profit center processing, timely decision-making, accurate reporting, and audit readiness. The automation of routine processes allowed finance teams to focus on strategic initiatives, improving overall operational reliability and efficiency. With a centralized, scalable, and insight-driven framework in place, the organization achieved 100% streamlined finance data governance, faster processing, and a robust foundation for sustainable growth.
