Performance Management Transformation
Budgeting & Reporting transformation of paper & print material supplier
Customer Profile
The Ball & Doggett is Australia’s largest distributor of printable materials and consumables and sells all sorts of raw materials that turn big ideas into reality.
The Customer sell materials for all kinds of purposes. Whether it is paper, packaging, wide format media, roll products, self-adhesive (pre-cut labels, rolls, and flat sheets), plastics, press consumables or envelopes.
The Company operate specialist teams that have deep product knowledge and close relationships with suppliers, which results in best outcome for customers within budget. Team's deep product knowledge and close relationships with suppliers results in solving issues and recommend the best way to come in within budget and get an awesome outcome.
Business Challenges
The B&D’s ability to deliver timely, comprehensive, and accurate business performance planning and reporting is limited due to the capability of the technology platforms used to support these business processes.
Historically, the B&D’s budgeting and reporting processes have been very manual and inflexible, take a lot of time to complete and are reliant on a huge amount of disparate excel spreadsheets. Distributed team in different location only accentuates the problem of planning.
These disparate spreadsheets require lots of data entry, data manipulation and reconciliation of multiple data sources. This eventually results in Excel Hell problem with little to no governance.
Proposed Solution Solution
3rd Rock engaged with B&D to identify, design, and implement a solution that met the Customer requirements, while also adhering to the budget and quality parameters.
The Customer used Microsoft ERP and were familiar with Azure platform, so 3rd Rock used combination of Microsoft based technologies for building a Planning and Reporting solution.
Being agnostic to the technology, 3rd Rock proposed ot built a planning and reporting solution using Microsoft and compatible CPM solution. These project was implemented in a business-led sprint-based approach.
Results & Outcomes
Collaborative FP&A solution with centralized process, data storage, governed calculation, and ability to plan and report data real-time
The solution implementation resulted in significant time reduction in data gathering - making more time for analysis. This has also resulted in reduction in cycle time for budgeting and reporting processes.
The process and calculation are now centrally governed and removing Excel dependencies has minimized the risk of errors due to manual processing; and remove reliance on “off-line” excel spreadsheets.
The solution framework allows the customer to work on a collaborative environment with centralized data storage, centrally governed calculation, and authorization to plan and report data real-time.
In response, the key decision makers can consolidate data silos in real time and complete the annual budget process in days instead of months. Additionally, end-users can generate interactive reports and drill through to the underlying transactions.