CLIENT

C. & G. Carandini S.A. is a company founded in 1919 with years of experience in the industrial and technical illumination sector. Since 2000, it has belonged to the Acuity Brands industrial group with headquarters in Atlanta which employs more than 15,000 workers all over the world. Carandini’s influence market is mainly based on the sale of illumination solutions in the Spanish, Portuguese and French markets.

SITUATION

Carandini has information in two non-linked databases. On the one hand, a SQL Server with its own CRM management system, customized for managing the commercial area. On the other hand, it has its own AS-400 and ERP for the operating and financial management.

The objective was to exploit the information of the two platforms to keep all the departments informed.

The main challenges faced were:

• they had too much information fed into the system and this gave them little visibility of the business;
• the database queries were complicated and they had difficulties maintaining the information,
• they lost a lot of time formatting and preparing reports in Excel format,
• there were a lot of departments totally unaware about their management

SOLUTION

To resolve the entire reporting problem, they started a tool assessment process. Out of all the tools, they assessed, for example, Crystal Reports or Hyperion; they found that most of them involved a lot of parameterization making the tool unfeasible for Carandini. Furthermore, another barrier for making this decision had to do with the price, which in some cases entailed a too pricey investment.

According to Sergi Muñoz, Carandini’s Director of Controlling, the key reasons that lead them to chose the DataCycle Reporting solution were ( in order of importance):

• Having the user interface in Excel considerably minimizes the training costs for all the users, only having to focus on the training of a very small group (designers and administrator). Furthermore, the fact that the user interface is in Excel also greatly minimizes the technological impact when implementing a new tool in the company and contributes to the acceptance of the new system.
• Easy parameterization
• Price
• Immediate implementation
• Results straight away

In its implementation, the DataCycle Reporting solution has been taken to the majority of the organization’s departments: Commercial, Finance, Operations, Controlling and IT. Amongst all the reports that have been automated, the following can be highlighted: order input and output, warnings on critical orders, order portfolio status, sales statistics for the commercial area, budget control reports or effects portfolio control reports, amongst many others.

DataCycle Reporting provided them for example with these improvements:

Account Management: When an invoice has exceeded the due date, the system sends, automatically, a report that alerts the rep that the client has not paid it yet. Before there was only proof in the Finance Dept., and now the reps can help the Finance Dept. to reclaim payments from their clients and they are aware of a fact that they did not know before, and furthermore can help them in negotiations.

BENEFITS

Thanks to DataCycle Reporting, Carandini has achieved significant time savings by generating the reporting, automatic information introduction by department and by employee and a total alignment in the objective control needs and priorities between departments.

In short, these are some of the benefits the solution has provided the company with:

Savings in communication times, thanks to the distribution of automated reports that the users directly receive in their electronic mail.

It improves the time for responding to any problem, with the automated distribution of reports and alerts that alert the users of deviations and unexpected events.

Unification of information criteria. Before, there could be different results from the same information. Now DataCycle Reporting integrates the data from all the systems in Excel templates in an automated way ensuring that the information the users receive is homogeneous.

The island of “privileged” information have been broken, thanks to the capacity for spreading the information en masse and everybody is informed of the management of their area, whilst before only a small group of persons had the information.

Increase in the quality of information entered in the system.

CONCLUSIONS

According to Sergi Muñoz, Carandini Director of Controlling: “The improvement in the management has been so significant that we consider not receiving information for more than three days a very critical situation”