Tag Archives: Consolidations

Jedox Apps in manufacturing & wholesale

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Lean-BI

Recently we interviewed GWA on how Jedox initially highlighted source data issues and helped them drive a culture that took data more seriously.

One of my favourite quotes was the answer to how many people in the business supported their Jedox: “One. Not even one full-time employee.” We’ve heard of lean-manufacturing but what about when you apply this to your information-based business processes? To help illustrate how efficient GWA have been, we’ve summarised just some of the business applications they use Jedox for.

Corporate Consolidations

Post organisational restructure meant reporting Financials for other businesses. The changes meant four businesses which require detail reporting in their own chart of accounts and complex mapping and consolidated reporting for the GWA Group for P&L Balance Sheet and Cash Flow.

Enterprise Budgeting and Forecasting

Comprehensive budgeting process from payroll, expenses, revenue drivers, sales and automatically calculating direct costs including customer freight accounts and line haul freight accounts.

Stock Management System

Monthly and Daily products claims, and information related to it, like customer, dates. The daily model is to support the operational view, including what is outstanding/pending, and what was closed yesterday. Every time a customer returns a product, this tracks the action. The monthly model generates KPIs by customers, warehouses, products, including claims by user, customer, processing days for each stage in the process, and days to be returned.

Inventory & Stock Management with Jedox

Inventory & Stock Management with Jedox

Sales & Inventory Analytics

The sales model details daily product analysis including by customer, currency, division, sales type.
By analysing historical sales pattern and stock consumption, you can improve their stock allocation in warehouses across the country. Stock turnover rates provide invaluable information on best-seller and order priorities.

GWA Caroma Inventory & Sales Analytics with Jedox

Sales Forecasting

Based on customers’ historical purchases across various channel, forecasting algorithms produce a sales plan which would which becomes the input for the manufacturing schedule.

Users enter their monthly plans by product group. It enables collaboration across the organisation for sales plans and a group consolidated view. Planning is for both individual manufactured products, and for products collections sold as a separate product, called an ‘assembly’.

Jedox is flexible, so it often ends up streamlining all types of business processes in a way that is easy for users, because you don’t eliminate Excel – just the drawbacks.

If you have some interesting ways your company uses Jedox, we’d love to hear from you!

The one thing you should do before you implement Business Intelligence

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Would you like to change an airplane engine while in-flight? Business Intelligence and Performance Management materially improve your corporate planning and reporting processes. But sometimes you expose problems that no one realised you had. Be prepared to shake things up.

Always up for a challenge, our team worked with GWA Bathroom & Kitchens to initially deploy Jedox deep within the budget cycle. What we found may surprise you. GWA Group designs, manufactures, imports and distributes domestic and commercial building fixtures and fittings and employs over 1,600 staff in Australasia. If you’ve ever been to a bathroom in Australia, you probably know their brands. GWA have been using Jedox intensively for over 4 years, including for Enterprise Budgeting & Forecasting, Daily Sales Reporting, Stock Management/Product Claims KPI’s, Consolidations & Management Reporting, and Inventory Analytics. In this interview with GWA Bathroom and Kitchen’s Commercial Manager, Malcom Dagg, we discuss the journey from before Jedox, the issues that surfaced during initial implementation, and the results today.

Making manufacturing more agile with Jedox

Naked Data: You mentioned Malcolm, that there was an absolute lack of data before Jedox. It was inaccessible?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: Yes, – your typical scenario with an ERP system. End-users had limited access to queries that IT had written to run a particular report to give them a filtered dump of information. There was no structure to that, other than what was there, and it was a limited data set.

Naked Data: Did you find that before Jedox there was controversy over the actual source of truth? Were you getting different answers when you read the data?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: Oh absolutely. We got different outcomes with respect to interpretation of sales numbers. One version would include something, another version wouldn’t. Nobody really understood. Other than the person who wrote it, nobody would understand what drove that difference.

Naked Data: So when Jedox came along, and you got access to data. Did that make an immediate change?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: We were literally in our budget cycle as we were finishing initial deployment, so for the first time it actually enabled us to get both a customer and product view in one data set. The other thing – and I think this was critical – is that ERP systems (often by the flexibility that comes with them), can allow for a lot of unconstrained data relationships. In other words, you can freely enter values into specific fields. While the field might have some validation and make sense on its own, when you look at it in the context of other fields, it doesn’t make sense – there’s no hierarchy or structure to it. Because of the structured approach Jedox demands you to start validating that data, we saw immediately that there were source data integrity issues.

Naked Data: So when the data validation initially popped up, what was the response? What actions were taken?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: It forced us to change some internal processes, particularly around product management, and coding of things like state codes and regions, product grouping and categories, so they were consistent. Previously people didn’t appreciate why this was important. All of a sudden they saw the data popping out in the wrong place on reports. They expected a product to fall in under a particular hierarchy, and instead it was under a different hierarchy – one that didn’t make sense. We were able to demonstrate very clearly that that was the outcome of poor source data.

Naked Data: 4 years ago now, you conducted a big study on different BI [Business Intelligence] options including Jedox. What did you consider?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: We looked at a range of products and technologies, from Microsoft Analysis Services through to Jedox. I was familiar with TM1 which had become part of the Cognos IBM BI/PM portfolio. I had a lot of knowledge around the traditional Cognos product as well. We looked at all of those. Then there was substantial internal debate. We assessed the product options and ran with Jedox.

Naked Data: What motivated you to choose Jedox?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: There were four things: Total Cost of Ownership was a consideration. Performance was another. Flexible writeback capability was paramount – that was a drop-dead decision point, and fourth, the confidence in the implementation [Naked Data] team. Because Jedox was in-memory and in many ways similar to TM1, (and I was very familiar with TM1) I knew that we weren’t overpaying for the same functionality, but we were easily getting equal technology.

GWA use Jedox for Performance Management

To make your bathroom shinier, just add Jedox

Naked Data: So with Jedox, you’ve been able to achieve what you would have been able to with comparative products of a much higher price?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: Absolutely. It’s about the level of optimisation that you get and the performance in the technology is absolutely paramount. There is no point using up all your budget on software and leaving nothing for the implementation. The implementation is where to the software’s potential into a solution for your business. You need people who are skilled in not just cutting basic code, but really working with you to optimise the business outcome. So for me, that’s the value you get from Naked Data’s expertise.

Naked Data: Looking at the changes Jedox has made in your business over the few years – obviously there have been huge gains in terms of data access and the planning you can now do with that data – what has that meant for the company?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: I’ll give you an example. We integrated two businesses about this time last year, and we haven’t integrated the two ERP systems. However, we’ve been able to bring the data together in a unified model by importing and translating data into Jedox. This enabled us to effectively manage and run the business as if it was operating on one platform. So that’s greatly aided our ability to manage a much larger consolidated business. We’ve also found from a product/sales/customer analytics point of view that we get much deeper insight than we were previously able to get.

On a more human scale, I had an experience the other day, where someone had to get hold of information very quickly. They said “I normally get it out of another platform, I have to go through a few different steps” and I said “Well, let’s just see if we can do this with Jedox”, and within a couple of minutes we had a live Jedox spreadsheet. The user said “wow, that makes my life so much easier”.

Naked Data: And how many people work at the back end? Maintaining the Jedox system, running the budget cycle, addressing other people’s queries?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: One. Not even one full-time employee. There are two business people, both combined less than one full-time equivalent, supporting the product.

Naked Data: So IT support is minimal?
Malcom Dagg, Commercial Manager, GWA: IT play an important role in BI implementations and BI applications are an opportunity for IT-shops to reduce business demands on them for data extraction and report writing. Once data structures are in place, BI should largely be an end-user application. Mature IT shops look at self-service BI positively and see the demand from users for information and reports diminishes because it is now easily available, particularly finance and sales teams. Importantly, you get one version of the truth.

Not-for-profit makes a change with global consolidations, management reporting, and budgeting

How do you help five billion people?

It’s well-proven that Jedox provides high Return on Investment because business and Finance love how Jedox empowers you to work more efficiently and you need little IT-support. The secret is that this helps you whatever industry you work in, and one place we’ve discovered Jedox really make a difference is in Community and Non-Profit organisations. It’s one thing to ‘improve shareholder value’ – another altogether to help some of the five billion people without reliable access to essential health care.

The George Institute for Global Health is a worldwide research organisation, with projects in over 50 countries and dedicated to improving the health and living conditions of millions of people. It has been ranked among the top 10 research institutions in the world for scientific impact.

With complex projects in multiple countries, the Institute needs efficient management processes for planning and project administration. Here Naked Data’s Sam Perrin interviews Management Accountant, Timothy Fung on how Jedox is making a difference at The George Institute.

Naked Data: What were you inspired by with Jedox initially?

Timothy Fung, The George Institute: Finance needed to report and plan easily without placing heavy demands on Finance staff. Our existing reporting software couldn’t quickly pull data from our Financial System [General Ledger: Microsoft Dynamics GP /Great Plains]. Each month we needed days to put management reports together. Our existing tool didn’t support budgeting or forecasting, and because our global projects are complex, we needed to drill-through to transactions to understand what was going on, and what made up the numbers.

So that was what we needed! Jedox was flexible to allow design from the ground-up rather than combining different tools for reporting, planning, dashboards and so-on which made it easy for Finance to manage. We discovered Naked Data and Jedox via word-of-mouth from another company which had positive experience with both.

Jedox help medical organisations like the George Institute for Global Health with Business Intelligence & Analytics

Planning and Budgeting for projects in over 50 countries is complex

Naked Data: What was the first move?

Timothy Fung, The George Institute: Naked Data first came in two years ago and focused on reporting from the General Ledger. Since then, our reporting has been online and we can access any time period, anytime. As the business has grown more complex, we’ve continued to add more data and new reporting.

The speed of getting information is fantastic. All reports are already set up so all we do is hit refresh. I can create new reports myself even though I do not have knowledge of computer programming. For quick and ad-hoc reporting, we can paste a live view out in any format we like. In the past, users would come and ask me for help and depending on the problem, it could take ages. Depending on the requests it can take as little as a few seconds to get the information needed because paste view is very easy to use.

Jedox is perfect for Not for Profits for budgeting & consolidated reporting

GIG projects health issues around the world

Naked Data: What did you tackle next?

Timothy Fung, The George Institute: The next target was our budgeting. Budgeting was convoluted. We had over 10 divisions, running over 50 projects with each budget prepared on a separate spreadsheet. If a change was required on the spreadsheet, we had to change every individual file. The collation process was tedious and it took days to compile.

So we set up Jedox models for all parts of our budgeting, including our complex payroll model. We designed some new processes from scratch and went through the design process iteratively with Naked Data and got regular feedback from end users.

Naked Data: How did you find working with Halim (Naked Data consultant Halim Joe)?

Timothy Fung, The George Institute: Halim has very good customer service, and very thorough. He has enabled pretty much everything. One of my goals at the moment is to find something that he can’t answer, and I cannot say for certain that I have found it.

If you are not using Jedox yet, you need to get your brain scanned

Jedox analytics helps improve project efficacy and financial management

Naked Data: What happened when you rolled out budgeting?

Timothy Fung, The George Institute: We rolled the solution out globally and empowered budget holders to own their budgets and gave them easier and quicker access to the information they needed. We pushed budget preparation to the project owners, rather than Finance doing it.

Naked Data: What next for the George Institute?

Timothy Fung, The George Institute: We have further enhanced our budget models since they were rolled out initially and added activity reporting. As far as Great Plains goes, Jedox has currently utilised the GL and we want to include AR in the future and integrate it with our Jedox reporting and modelling.

Snapshot: Jedox Project Global Consolidations, Management Reporting and Budgeting
Industry: Not for profit
Source data: Microsoft Dynamics GP; SQL Server; Payroll system

Logistics intelligence

From little things, big things grow – how to manage consolidation complexity in a finance-friendly way.

In this interview we take a look at a ‘bread and butter’ Jedox use that you can see the world-over – Corporate Consolidations (yay!). However, this case is a little more complex than most and an example of how Business Intelligence projects often need to work in reality. Within a tight timeframe, the project team must live with a lot of ambiguity, and have with the confidence that their approach of continuous iterative efforts will gradually enable them to build up a comprehensive solution. The results are compelling.

McAleese Group is a leading Australian provider of specialised transport and logistics solutions across Australia. The newly-formed group brought together over 2000 employees in 15 separate companies – each with their own financial systems and unique chart of accounts. In this interview, with Sam Perrin, the General Manager of Finance, Colin Petrie discusses how McAleese is leveraging Jedox to consolidate 15 separate ledgers structures into a single view to enable management visibility and empower decision making.

McAleese Transport use Jedox to consolidate across 15 separate and very different ledgers

Naked Data: What has been the main benefit of working with Jedox at McAleese?
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: The group had recently made a major acquisition, which introduced a number of additional companies and general ledger systems. There was no common way of reporting across the various businesses. There was a mix of general ledger systems with cost centre hierarchies and others with a flat design. We were using Excel for our reporting and also to perform manual consolidation. There was no common chart of accounts or automated consolidation across the 15 different general ledger systems.

We implemented Jedox in a few months and reported the whole of the previous year, running Jedox parallel through that period. Then we used Jedox for the year-end consolidation and close.

Naked Data: It sounds like you had some fairly complex business challenges to solve!
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: We identified that we didn’t have the systems or processes to report the larger group results on an ongoing basis in a timely manner. We saw Jedox as a tool that could enable us to quickly establish a common platform and consolidation process across the group. First priority was to scope out the project and engage a business partner to assist us.

With 15 different ledgers, maintained by separate IT and Finance teams, it was clear there was going to be a significant amount of technical work to extract data from these systems. The mapping process would involve a considerable amount of work, due to the different account structures used across the multiple systems. We also identified the need to develop a new common chartered account structure across the group. We also wanted to develop reporting to enable both statutory reporting and for use and production of our management reports.

As an approach, we wanted to make the project as efficient as possible and minimise the interruption to the day-to-day processes within each business. We assembled a small project team to work on this as a dedicated project and engage with relevant people within the business.

Naked Data: What was it about Jedox that initially got your attention?
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: The larger McAleese group had just been formed, and we needed a common platform, but weren’t in a position to deploy a single ERP system across all businesses. We were therefore looking for a solution that could sit across the various General Ledger systems and therefore provide us with a common reporting platform.

What I liked about Jedox was it had depth to help us manage our complexity but was still intuitive and finance-friendly. Having had exposure to other products, I largely knew what we needed. I’d previously had exposure to TM1. With the complexity of disparate chart accounts and a lot of business processes to map and bed down, I knew we needed a solution similar to TM1 that provided flexibility at a comparatively low operating cost. However, I also needed to ensure that we weren’t hit with high licence fees and ongoing maintenance costs.

Our vision wasn’t simply a consolidation tool at the group level, but to enable management reporting for each distinct business, so it was critical we had both a fast and easy to use tool; complemented by a sustainable licence model that didn’t hold us back us from rolling out across the organisation.

The McAleese Jedox model does some heavy lifting to bring all the data together

Naked Data: How did you go about selecting Jedox?
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: We needed something that was easy to use and could grow with our business and quickly adapt to changes and which we could support internally. We initially lined up a demonstration with Naked Data. Naked Data were very quick to turnaround a sample model using our own data, which was really helpful because it provided tangible proof of what we could deliver with Jedox.

We conducted reference checks. I was familiar with the environments and systems which two of the referees provided, and I was able to gain comfort that they had been able to successfully deploy and use Jedox in their organisations. This gave me a lot of comfort and really reinforced my confidence in the tool.

Naked Data: Were there challenges getting IT on board?
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: No. Installation of Jedox was supported by a management team and our IT department. Our IT team were part of the project team and worked closely with the Naked Data consultants.

Naked Data: A project that defines new business and reporting processes sounds like a challenge to scope upfront, especially on a tight deadline. Can you tell us more about the implementation itself?
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: We engaged a Naked Data consultant (Angelo Ho) on a full-time basis throughout the project, working alongside our internal project team. We engaged regularly with Angela and Chris (Naked Data director Chris Mentor) on the project and project deliverables. We also recruited and trained a person experienced in BI that could support us and manage Jedox on an ongoing basis. The selected candidate had previous experience with TM1 and was able to quickly get up to speed with Jedox.

One of the best things about the implementation was that the mandate from the CFO meant I didn’t have to deal with bureaucracy. Initially we scoped the broader project with Naked Data. With ambiguities in many areas, we agreed to work on a time/materials approach that enabled us to refine what we did iteratively. Angela [Naked Data consultant, Angela Ho] worked alongside us constantly onsite. Angela liaised with Naked Data principal, Chris Mentor regularly on timeline and budget, but we ran the project as if Angela worked for us. From then on, the project hung on two things – knowing what we wanted and Angela’s proficiency in delivering that.

Naked Data: How did you find Angela’s work?
Colin Petrie, General Manager Finance: Angela was good. The project wouldn’t have succeeded without her. She was able to understand the business structures, and what we were trying to do. We did the account mapping, and the team was able to take a concept that I had and design the Jedox model, create the automated load and extraction processes and build in checks and balances. The iterative approach meant we could rapidly refine the design as we discovered more, and Jedox lends itself to this type of approach perfectly. The documentation Angela wrote was great which made it easy for our team to take ownership. As a solution Jedox has provided us with much needed visibility and reporting. Angela’s role was instrumental to the success of the project

Naked Data: What’s next for Jedox and McAleese?
The various Finance teams from each business are coming on board now that we have started producing management reports. Next we need to build forecast models and create a forecast environment. That’s going to be relatively straightforward [Jedox enables forecasting out of the box]. The next significant project is getting sales and transactional data, then expand into the detail budget modelling. We will build all the budgets in Jedox.

Business function: Corporate consolidations with Jedox
Industry: Transport & Logistics. Source system: MAPICS, S2000, MYOB, Freight2020

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