RAM Enterprise, Inc. provides industrial maintenance and construction services to the mining, aggregate, chemical processing, and power generation industries. The company also has a manufacturing arm, IMTECH Rubber Products, which manufactures and markets a line of rubber products aimed at wear, abrasion, dust containment, and noise reduction solutions in conveyor belt applications. With 200 employees and service centers located throughout the Western United States, RAM Enterprise’s financial reporting needs are substantial.
The company has used Sage 100 ERP for more than half the its 20+ year existence, a system it finds efficient at processing financial information. However, its financial statements were generated using Microsoft FRx. Ian C. Weight, Chief Financial Officer, acknowledges that FRx was accurate at generating the numbers and fairly quick at exporting the financials to Microsoft Excel, but the templates were cumbersome and a great deal of manual work was necessary to format and provide the detailed information required.
To provide managers of individual business units with just the basic information they needed, Ian and his team produced a monthly financial report pack that included four separate sheets for each reporting facility, including several profit and loss sheets showing actual figures vs. budget, previous 12-month trends, current year side-by-side monthly comparisons, and monthly budgeted figures. Turnaround time for month-end financial reporting was about 15 business days, the majority of the working month, with processing time taking a full eight-hour day. In general, the process was time consuming and not responsive to management’s need to produce timely, effective reports.
To simplify their reporting process, Ian and his team considered Biznet and Sage Intelligence, choosing to implement Sage Intelligence because of the benefit of being able to report from multiple modules in Sage as well as non-ERP data sources. Ian is unequivocal in his praise of Sage Intelligence. “We have been extremely happy. We have actually increased the number of financial reports that are provided to each facility from four to six, with additional analysis provided in the reports, and still reduced the time to process them from eight hours to one hour. Our turnaround has gone down to six days. While other efforts have contributed to that improvement, Sage Intelligence has alleviated, if not eliminated, some of the bottlenecks that previously hampered our efforts and frustrated us so much.”
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