Implementing Data Cube Financials for Sell Side Readiness
The Situation
An Established Aerospace company determined that they did not have enough depth into their Gross Profit Financials while preparing their Quality of Earnings Report. A lack of relevant reports with needed sales categories and views along Gross Profit detail was not footing back to the trial balance revenue and cost of goods sold – which led the private equity Sponsor to reach out for support. The Sponsor was already engrossed in the Quality of Earnings report process and had less than two months to provide needed data at a Customer, Product, and Aircraft level with labor, parts, and burden segregated out and footing back to the Trial Balance that had been provided.
Services
Data Cube
Sell Side Readiness
Quality of Earnings Report
Sales Dimensionality
The Execution
Data Cube Build
- Access to the core ERP (Quantum), the underlying Oracle tables, and various manually produced reports were accessed.
- Accordion, working in a combined data architect and a business role, was able to determine which data tables were needed to produce the various views needed for the QofE report.
- The data tables were mapped with little support from the business based on financial reports provided.
- Additional external data sources were accessed and linked to the data cube to reference part numbers to Aircrafts by tail number.
- This allowed a depth of sales reporting that the client had not ever been able to see before. Gross Profit was broken down by part, labor, and overhead – again a view not before accessible.
Training
- Due to the accuracy and visibility that the Data Cube provided, Accordion was requested to do a Phase II and implement the final reporting into the business.
- The SQL set up and data table architecture was transferred to the client server and daily auto refreshes were set up to allow for sales and gross profit reporting to be viewed on a much higher frequency.
- End user training was provided to the finance team down to the regional level.
The Results
With Accordion’s help, the Sales and Gross Profit visibility were expanded to several additional views never used before by the Client. Finance users down to the regional level now use the Data Cube to produce their month end reports, using the saved time to investigate and resolve items opposed to spending excessive time simply creating the reports.