Brandix Mercury launched to optimise financial processes and practices

The Brandix group has implemented the first stage of a visionary plan to take the apparel solutions provider beyond the manufacture and export of apparel to becoming a massive knowledge-based company that could ‘in-source’ the business processing requirements of top international retail brands.

The company said that last week it formally inaugurated Brandix Mercury, a sophisticated Shared Services Centre (SSC) at the World Trade Centre in Colombo to drive a ‘Transformation for Growth’ or ‘T4G’ plan that will initially undertake an optimisation of financial processes across the group and be a strategic partner to its 25 business units.

Mandated to bring about a measurable group-wide increase in efficiency by providing centralised transaction processing to decision-support, the Centre has already taken over 95 percent of the financial accounting processes of the Brandix Group and brought together most of the personnel responsible for these processes.

Speaking at the inauguration, Brandix Chairman Ken Balendra said the Shared Services Centre was an initiative that the Board had backed to the hilt. Pointing out that the establishment of such centres is now the trend the world over, he said he looked forward to hearing of the vast strides and material benefits that would arise as a result of this initiative.

Brandix CEO Ashroff Omar said the Centre has the potential to expand its capabilities to offer similar value-added services to its top international customer base. Stressing that “our vision is to grow this into a massive knowledge-based company,” Omar said: “We have excellent contacts with the world’s best brands and the best retailers. Extending our concept of inspired solutions to encompass value-added services is therefore a logical step.”

The Shared Services Centre, whose primary task will be transforming finance for growth, will be responsible for process standardisation, process documentation and the harmonisation of accounting standards and practices across the Brandix Group and the alignment of all financial accounting policies with Group policy and goals.