Elizabeth Ferrell recognized for her leadership in Kroger’s financial transformation

Kroger is on a mission and dedicated to its purpose to feed the human spirit by making fresh food accessible to all. Kroger, across its family of companies, is nearly half a million associates who serve more than 11 million customers daily through a seamless digital shopping experience and retail food stores under a variety of banner names. It aims to serve America through food inspiration and uplift, and it plans to reduce hunger and eliminate waste through its #ZeroHungerZeroWaste communities by 2025.

That mission also depends on technology and champions. In the last few years Kroger has been investing in modernizing its finance and accounting systems to transform and drive better business efficiency and enable agility. These efforts earned Elizabeth Ferrell, Kroger’s Financial Reporting and Systems Director, the Customer Appreciation Award; which is given to a customer who exemplifies business leadership through their contributions to the Oracle Cloud Enterprise Data Management (EDM) user community.

At the recent ODTUG Kscope23 event, Elizabeth discussed the value of EDM to Kroger as a data quality and governance enabler: “With the help of  EDM we ensure that all beans are accounted for. It makes sense to have our finance teams use powerful tools and applications, rather than driving more complexity into our system code sets that cannot grow organically with our business nor align financial master data across accounting, planning, and financial close processes.”

EDM, the secret sauce for moving at the speed of business for Kroger

Kroger continues to grow. It is more than a grocery store, with manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, health, wellness teams, and more. With its breadth of offerings comes business complexity, and Elizabeth’s ultimate responsibility is to accurately report historical performance while forecasting the future.

Kroger needed a new solution for multiple reasons. It required a solution that could work with multiple legacy systems while fitting within its finance modernization initiative and could synchronize its Chart of Accounts (COA) into Oracle Cloud ERP on an ongoing basis. It also needed a solution that could provide essential change governance and control and could free up valuable talent for more value-added activities. An EDM solution was critical to transforming its finance systems to enable Kroger to create strategic plans and accurate, timely retrospective analyses.  Oracle Cloud EDM lends itself well to an incremental approach and helps enterprises like Kroger adapt to change in an agile manner and take a phased approach to reduce risk during its transformation.  

“I knew we could not go on to a single chart of accounts without EDM as our driving force behind everything. EDM has played a key role in our transformation.” — Elizabeth Ferrell, Financial Reporting and Systems Director, Kroger

The Oracle Customer Appreciation Award is a peer-driven program with winners selected by the Oracle Cloud EDM community. These leaders represent the best in finance and the future of the industry. Kroger had set out on a transformation journey involving the modernization of its finance systems across significantly different business units including retail stores, manufacturing, warehouses, and logistics. As it operates each business unit differently, it wanted to establish chart of accounts control on a corporate level, and sought an intuitive, repeatable, governance design. Thanks to Elizabeth’s leadership and her team, Kroger is achieving these goals. Congratulations to Elizabeth!