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Global revenue growth and a doubling of the workforce in just one year meant more financial complexity — far beyond the capabilities of Excel and an aging ERP system from QAD.
“We had nine VPs and senior directors who needed regular updates on the business, but cutting and pasting the data from our 50-plus workbook spreadsheet was a nightmare,” said Medrobotics Controller Gary Kolanda. “It was always worrisome that a user would insert or delete a row or a column.” There was no way to know whether the consolidated results reflected reality.
Three Months in Excel
New territories and more expansive product offerings complicated the budget process for Kolanda and his three-person team. Specifically, Medrobotics would pull and combine data from a new CRM system, the existing ERP system, and a fixed asset system. Everything fed into Excel workbooks for compiling a profit and loss statement, plus a balance sheet and cash flow statement. “You just kind of held your breath that you didn’t end up with a break in a formula someplace with all the cell and worksheet referencing we had going on,” Kolanda says.
Errors and omissions led to persistent delays in the budgeting process. All told, Kolanda said his team would set aside three months to work on budgets. “With all the scenarios we had and potential iterations we were looking at as we grew, it made no sense to push spreadsheets back and forth, requiring users to make changes before sending them to the board and getting even more changes,” Kolanda said.
Programming growth with cloud-based EPM
After a competitive review of six EPM vendors, including Adaptive Insights, Kolanda decided to go with Host Analytics — and it quickly proved to be the ideal solution. “Coming out of day one, I knew the decision to adopt Host Analytics was a good one,” he said. “We now have a tool that helps us define a roadmap for the future that includes international expansion and maybe even a public offering.”
Kolanda’s team uses Host Analytics to track R&D projects as distinct entities so that it’s easier to assign spend to works in development. Over time, he wants to connect the dots and discover the type of spend it takes to create a new, winning product from the ground up. And in the meantime, a budget process that was three months long is now completed in half the time and yields better insights.
“We no longer just do budgeting. We’re using Host Analytics for integrated planning, and using Spotlight so that sales, operations, and finance work in sync to evaluate and react to changes in the marketplace as we grow,” Kolanda concludes.
To learn more about how cloud-based EPM from Host Analytics can help your organization succeed, check out the customer video from Medrobotics.
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