Case Studies

Visibility for Supply Chain Finance

2 minute read

The Client

Snack food company

The Challenge

One global snack food company acquired another to expand its market share in the health snacks space. The acquisition led to the need for greater finance and supply chain visibility across the organization.

The challenge was the company’s legacy reporting techniques required large amounts of time and resources, and business leaders weren’t receiving the data needed to drive quick decision making.

The Solution

The company brought on Catena Solutions to create better visibility and insights. We assembled a team consisting of a digital finance partner and business intelligence consultant to design a solution.

Our consultants developed a suite of dashboards in Tableau to bring data to the forefront, provide insightful analytics, and help stakeholders visualize business performance.

The dashboards also updated automatically and seamlessly with ERP data, serving as a single source of truth for company decisions.

Dashboards included:

  • Weekly KPIs: Weekly reports and key market intel covering sales, customer, product line, service level, and inventory visibility and valuation.
  • Volume reporting: Provided insights on quantity, weight, and unit level for sales, manufacturing, and inventory. Focused on movements inbound, outbound, and on-hand.
  • P&L and balance sheet: Assisted with pre- and post-financial period close activities to detect variance in income statements and balance sheets. Included a level of drill down in the variance to see line level drivers.
  • Overhead costing: Showed overhead spend analysis by country, entity, functions, and individual departments. Included variance analysis vs. plan, forecasts, and last year as well as walk/waterfalls highlighting key drivers of variance both in spend and spend as a percentage of sales.
  • Head count reporting: Reported on head count vs. plan and spend per head count by function, department, and variance vs. plan and last year.
  • Working capital and net cash from operations: Covered organizational metrics including Days Sales Outstanding, Days Payable Outstanding, and Days Inventory Outstanding. Also included walks to show variance in cash flow statements and provided in-depth analysis to show line level drivers of working capital, including AR by customers, payment terms analysis, AP by suppliers and terms analysis, inventory by product line/SKU and vs. demand and production plans.

The Benefit

The dashboards provided the company with key insights to drive organizational improvements and quick decision making.

Time and resources were freed up, allowing company leaders to strategize and execute improvements instead of spending valuable time mining and analyzing fragmented data. Our solutions also equipped the finance department with the knowledge to drive the business towards targeted profitability goals and prepare for future acquisitions.

Facing any similar challenges? Contact us to discuss how Catena Solutions can help.

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