A private-equity-backed distributor of food and beverage products had recently undergone an ERP transformation.
To better leverage the quality of information available via their new ERP, the company established a new FP&A team and equipped them with a 3rd party business intelligence tool (i.e., PowerBI / Tableau).
Despite their newfound ability to aggregate, explore and visualize data, senior management struggled to find value in the outputs due to both the time lag between the underlying data (transactions) and the reporting via the 3rd-party tools and the trustworthiness of the analysis being presented, which never seemed to reconcile to the company’s financial statements.
Overlay leveraged its existing mapping of the underlying ERP to transform transaction-level data into common, repeatable business logic, automated the daily (near-real-time) extraction of information from the systems, and harmonized all captured and remodeled data into a data warehouse.
The company’s business intelligence teams could seamlessly connect their 3rd party tools to this trusted data repository and use the underlying metrics defined via Prism to power their ongoing analysis and reporting.
Management, able to at a glance reconcile financial and operational reporting coming from the business intelligence teams back to financial results, immediately began trusting the intelligence being produced by their teams.
Today, we continue working with this client to crystallize many of their repeated models, originally built in a 3rd party tool, into our Pulse reporting tool, monitored daily by company executives and their private equity sponsors.
Time lag between transactions and 3rd party reporting tools
Analysis was not matching company’s financial statements