What’s an example of that?
Sales is the heartbeat of our business—our customers include retail stores, bars, and big companies like Costco and Sam’s Club. The first question a manager might have is, how many cases did someone sell? But we can do a lot more than that. We can now look at profitability per case, and the profitability of each sales person and division. We’re doing a lot more internal analysis of how productive we are. We’re able to do this because all of our HR and finance data is in one system. The data provided, and information we have today at a detailed level, is significantly better than what we had prior.
What did your team think about getting a new finance system?
They were uncomfortable at first, but that’s understandable, because it was such a big paradigm shift. They’d been using the same system for nearly 15 years and had certain ways of doing things. I assured people that it was just another change, like other changes in the past that they ultimately grew comfortable with.
Now, we’ve all gotten much better at our jobs. We’ve scaled back the (financial) closing process significantly. It would take 15 or more days in the old system, and now we’re shooting for a five- to 10-day close. People have learned to use a tag rather than enter a journal code, and are delighted with all the information we have. It’s kind of opened our eyes to things that we weren’t really good at with our prior system. We get things tied up a lot faster than we had in the past—it’s the continual improvement of process and data.