Performance management practice in brief: ARI Armaturen
When working with Excel in business management, sooner or later you will come up against its limits, as Dennis Vogt from ARI-Armaturen in the North Rhine-Westphalian city of Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock discovered. ARI is a leading multinational supplier of heavy-duty valves for the control, isolation, safety and steam trapping of liquid and gaseous media. Its portfolio includes over 20,000 products in more than 200,000 variants. In this short interview, the Head of Controlling and Investment Management tells us how he made planning and consolidation significantly more efficient and flexible and why he now has more time to spend on analyses.
What was your starting point?
Vogt: Our aim was to combine our Excel-based planning and consolidation in an integrated system. We wanted to set up central data structures and no longer to merge the data subsequently at several different locations. This principle was to be implemented in both areas – we wanted to integrate planning and consolidation in a single solution so that we could finally put local planning into practice.
What were the highlights?
With the solution, we have been able largely to automate our management reporting. We no longer need to prepare the data. This has made us far more efficient in our reporting, with extra time to spend on analyses. The highlight in the implementation was Corporate Planning Consultant Arne Kottmann's expert guidance – however user-friendly a program may be, you'll still need to learn the ropes at the start.
What lessons have you learned?
I'd advise anyone to have a good look beforehand at the structures to be created in a digitisation project. How are the different structures in, say, Corporate Planner and the Corporate Planning Suite connected? Internal processes and accounting rules should also be subjected to scrutiny with a view to automating them as far as possible.
About ARI-Armaturen Albert Richter GmbH & Co. KG and the project
Topics: reporting, consolidation, planning
Sector: industrial valves
Turnover: € 150 m
Employees: 850
Users: 5 – 10
Pre-systems: ERP system (Infor LN)
You can read more about how software solutions for operational management, financial planning and consolidation are implemented and used in practice HERE.
ierung finden Sie HIER.
