Concrete Products Manufacturer - Dallas, Texas
Summary:
  • Increased management’s control with a detailed view into 90+ plants within two days of monthly close
  • Executives have more detailed information and are able to make better business decisions with comprehensive analysis by plant, account, product, legal entity, time, scenario (actual, budget, forecast)
  • Improved budget accuracy and efficiency with analysis of actual versus budget versus forecast by account
  • Financial analysts are more accurate with access to daily sales updates
  • Greatly decreased amount of time for report configuration—reports now available on a monthly basis
  • Time spent on analysis increased by 28%
  • Vastly reduced amount of time spent on system maintenance
  • Despite constant company growth, fixed costs for the leveraged system remain unchanged

    • Full Story:
    Volatile raw materials costs were taking a toll on our client’s profits. However, without proper reporting systems in place, they were unable to pinpoint the cause of falling profits. As one of the leading concrete product manufacturers in the country with over 90 plants and more than 3,800 employees, this client recognized the need to update their current financial reporting and inventory analysis system. The engagement grew into an entire reporting and analysis suite, including web-based capital expenditure tracking and authorization, plant and management reporting, budgeting and forecasting, and trend analysis.

    Talented, hard-working team members were spending over half of their time creating and manipulating reports instead of working on profit driving projects. With at least one workbook per region, users found themselves scrambling to come up with the correct data; the burden of maintenance on such a scattered system became too much to bear.

    LiveLogic delivered a system that even the busiest executives could find time to review. The time that it used to take for reports to be configured was cut in half, leaving more time to focus on analyzing data rather than compiling it. Time spent on analysis increased by almost 30%, and as a result, better, more informed business decisions are made, and people are able to spend their time more efficiently. The suite will pay for itself in less than six quarterly cycles. It was, and still continues to be, a very successful relationship.

    Technology:

  • Financial reporting database: Hyperion Essbase
  • Financial reporting user interface: Excel front-end with database back-end
  • Forecasting user interface: Excel front-end with database back-end
  • Data source: Legacy GL database with daily and monthly feeds
  • Cap-Ex tracking database: SQL Server
  • Cap-Ex tracking user interface: Custom web interface

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