East Equipment (IBM Cognos Business Intelligence)

On January 13, 2015 the Columbus company announced budgeting system implementation based on the solutions IBM Cognos in East Equipment company.

Choosing a Solution

For several last years the company endures rapid growth that affects also the IT strategy of the organization. The previous system of corporate planning and the reporting was insufficiently effective, and the guide of the dealer decided to update it using the solutions IBM Cognos TM1 and IBM Cognos BI. The Columbus company acted as the partner of the project.

Project Task

Implementation the company distributor intends quality of budgets for the main activities - to sale of the equipment and spare parts, services in lease and service maintenance. The budgeting system on the IBM Cognos TM1 platform will succeed extremely long and labor-consuming planning in the MS Excel.

Project Progress

The choice of the solution and the partner was not accidental: East Equipment and Columbus cooperate more than 8 years in a row within projects of automation. "The Columbus command once again proved that it is interested in us as the client and is ready to organize project management with observance of all our conditions — Roman Davydov, the IT manager of East Equipment company said. — Besides, this international organization with branches in several countries already several times proved to be the reliable partner. Consultants of Columbus speak English, prepare project documents in English that is very important for us". At the moment a system is brought into commercial operation. Budgets make in all key areas of work of East Equipment — sale of the new and second-hand equipment, sale of spare parts, services in lease, repair and service maintenance. "East equipment" uses the created solution in details to plan income, expenses and balance of the company.

On a response of the customer, the end-to-end system of management based on the solutions IBM Cognos in general increased transparency and quality of planning process of East Equipment company. The staff of financial department in real time traces at what stage of budgeting there is a company what branches in what region submitted budgets and what are not present.

Result

According to representatives of East Equipment, before implementation of IBM Cognos TM1 the planning cycle made 1 month, now preparation of budgets takes no more than two weeks. The annual budget is reviewed every quarter, the five-year budget — annually. About 80 people are involved in a planning cycle — generally it is the staff of financial divisions of head office and regional branches.

As told in Columbus, IBM Cognos BI provides operational and exact collection of data on activity of the company from different sources: ERP systems, a payroll system and HR records, the systems of Caterpillar for sales planning of machines, spare parts and services. All these data come to the storage constructed based on the MS SQL Server and will be transformed to a required format. On their basis budgets of the company form, the plan-fact analysis is made, the consolidated financial statements (PnL, balance) are under construction, different reports and multidimensional cubes for detailed income analysis, expenses and balances of the distributor prepare. In IBM Cognos BI a number of the internal reports regulated for East Equipment which managers use for the operational analysis of the current situation also prepares. Before implementation of an automated system finance division compared planned and actual targets of the company only during preparation of the monthly reporting. Now the plan-fact analysis can be done daily that optimizes budget implementation control. The corporate financial statements are also given once a month, but terms of its preparation, on a response of the customer, thanks to a BI system decreased twice.

"a BI system helped us to solve several problems. First of all, we reduced time of drawing up and verification of corporate statements. Earlier this process took 10 days, only 5 now. Secondly, we increased quality of data in the accounting systems — Roman Davydov summed up the project results. — If in initial data there are any errors if there are not enough data, a system helps to detect and eliminate all inaccuracies and discrepancies in the course of preparation of the corporate reporting in time".

"We plan functional revenue budgets of service and spare parts on each single piece of equipment on the basis of the predicted repairs, depending on the current operating time of the machine and operating conditions. A new system helps us to understand whether the company of the purpose on sales executes, whether it is ready to provide profitability at the existing costs, and, on the contrary, to trace whether a current income of the company covers our cost" — Roman Davydov explained.

"Plus of a new budgeting system — that now we precisely know how the annual income of our company depending on sales volume in a current period of this or that model of the machine, existence of orders for spare parts, agreements on service maintenance will change" — Roman Davydov, the IT manager, East Equipment noted.

"We calculate that the system of budget management created by us on the basis of IBM Cognos TM1 and Cognos BI will provide the accelerated receiving necessary financial information and will promote adoption of more reasonable, weighed solutions", – Anton Globus, the chief financial officer of East Equipment emphasized. – There is a lot of tasks in the project, but, considering that the team of specialists of Columbus acts as the partner in implementation well-known to us, we do not doubt that we will manage to perform conceived at the scheduled time".

Representatives of the company integrator reported TAdviser.