HeidelbergCement AG

Treasury All-inclusive

HeidelbergCement is one of the world’s largest building materials companies and is the global marketing leader in cement, concrete and other downstream activities. The company, with 140 years of history, employs around 51,000 people at 2,500 locations in more than 40 countries and generated sales of EUR 13.9 billion in 2013. HeidelbergCement is the only building materials company listed on the DAX.

The Challenge

As a large, multinational company operating globally across all time zones, the treasury department at HeidelbergCement required an efficient and flexible system for the commissioning and management of guarantees that would also be expandable. The company was looking to centralize payment transactions and other treasury responsibilities by integrating them into a secure treasury management system.

The Solution: Step by step process integration

Beginning in 2006, the integrated system, tm5, was implemented and rolled out. The system efficiently manages all bank, corporate and received guarantees – which can total 7,000 at any given time. Group-wide all subsidiaries have a real-time, transparent overview, with minimal effort in the management and reporting. This transparency also applies to the group’s worldwide account balances. In addition, liquidity planning is now handled in a far more efficient and transparent way.

LMPayment was implemented in 2008 to replace the existing, individualized payment solutions, offering a centralized, fully-integrated multi-bank payment solution. The “Payment Factory” now handles multi-country and multi-bank processing of both domestic and cross-border payments. TTContract was implemented in 2011, consolidating and automating interest and currency management. FX and money market transactions are easily imported from the FX trading platform, 360T. Bank confirmations are managed electronically by using a direct connection to the confirmation platform, Mysis. The reconciliation of overdue payments is managed directly within tm5 and the content relevant to posting can be transmitted to the ERP system.