The retail chain stores Alphabet of Taste complete the project of automation of schedule system

The company "CORUS Consulting" completed the project of automation of schedule system in network of product supermarkets "Alphabet of Taste" on the basis of the free solution Jedox Palo.

Background

In 2010 the Alphabet of Taste supermarket chain had a need of increase in efficiency and quality of the operating system of mid-term and long-term planning.

Decrease in labor costs on formation of plans, increase in reliability and quality of planned data, increase in level of information security – three key tasks which rose before financial department of network. The decision to automate the existing planning model was made. The CORUS Consulting system integrator became the partner in the project.

Solution

As the automation equipment the free Palo software product – the solution for automation of budgeting, consolidation and transformation of financial statements and creation of a system of the business analysis from the German company Jedox was selected. A client part of Palo is implemented in the form of the MS Excel plug-in. Feature of Palo – the open code, complete freedom of use, lack of runtime royalty fees.

In a specific case the choice Jedox Palo was caused by use in the company of transparent model of planning in which there are no bulky calculations and algorithms. The possibility of further development of model of planning by own forces became also important factor when choosing this program.

Implementation

During the project integration with the accounting system of Alphabet of Taste - MS Dynamics NAV is implemented. For data transmission between applications Open Source-products are used. The accounting system exports necessary data for the period determined by the user to the file which then is imported to Palo Server then the user can obtain data in any section, using the Palo tools for analytical processing of multidimensional data in real time (OLAP). Loading process and transformations of data in a month takes no more than two minutes.

Opinion

"Two key factors served as the key to success of the project: interest of management of the company in the end result and the formalized forecasting model prepared by the client for the beginning of the project, - the project manager from Corus Consulting Alexey Kulakov comments. – The efficiency of budget planning directly affects commercial success of the enterprise, and application of an automated system allows to exempt business analysts from routine manual transactions and to use their time more effectively – directly for a financial analysis. The company management has an opportunity at once, in real time, to see weak points and to influence quickly a situation".