FP&A Team Saves Up to a Week per Month by Consolidating Reporting, Forecasting, and Budgeting and Reducing Manual Data Entry
Planful Inc., the pioneer of financial planning & analysis (FP&A) and consolidations cloud software, announced that Planful has helped Elgin Power and Separation Solutions centralize and modernize its financial processes. As Elgin’s FP&A solution of choice, Planful has supported the company on it’s digital transformation journey, including standardizing its financial processes, reporting, and planning methodologies to meet the ownership group’s requirements.
Elgin, a global manufacturer of processing equipment for the oil and coal industries for 150 years, has operations in the United States, India, Abu Dhabi, Canada, and Russia. The business has grown significantly via multiple acquisitions, buying individual manufacturing businesses and creating spinoffs to create a network of manufacturing plants and related operations. Prior to deploying Planful, each acquired company continued using its own processes to create reports and budgets. The FP&A team had to spend more than a week per month organizing, reformatting, and consolidating spreadsheets received from operating units across the business. Time spent combining and manually entering data was time FP&A team members couldn’t spend conducting analysis for deeper financial insights.
By deploying Planful’s cloud platform, the team now saves more than a week each month through faster, streamlined reporting and uses that time to focus on high-value activities. Planful provides a central platform to ensure consistency, reducing the FP&A team’s workload so they can focus on strategic analysis.
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“Our forecasts and budgets go very smoothly now,” said Mike Petrauskas, Manager of Financial Planning and Analysis at Elgin. “We spend significantly less time testing out numbers and more time on analysis. Planful saves our plant controllers at least a half-day each month and saves our corporate controller as much as a week every month. The more time we save for the business, the more time they can spend running their operation.”
Having a single platform to consolidate the company’s financial data breaks down data silos and simplifies budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting, but Petrauskas and his team see these improvements as an initial use case to build on. Planful’s platform provides a foundation to enable other departments to take a more collaborative approach to planning, as well as opportunities to generate ad hoc analytics that drive faster, more iterative decision-making across the company.
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The Elgin FP&A team has already moved multiple processes to the Planful platform to expand the benefits to more areas within the finance function and beyond, making progress on the company’s Continuous Planning journey and moving toward digital transformation. As more business units take advantage of a shared platform to collaborate and leverage accurate, real-time data for better decision-making, the entire company becomes more agile and resilient as the financial IQ of the organization increases.
“FP&A teams are at the forefront of digital transformation, creating plans and modeling scenarios to help their organizations navigate rapidly evolving business conditions,” said Grant Halloran, Chief Executive Officer, Planful. “Planful is here for companies that make up the heart of our economy and ready to help FP&A teams maximize their expertise and capabilities, so they can meet the unique challenges in their marketplaces by working together in a more connected, collaborative, and agile way.”
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