Apex Entertainment Performs Enterprise Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning
Apex Entertainment, headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, operates four family entertainment centers in the northeast U.S. including Virginia Beach, Syracuse, Albany and Marlborough. Apex offers attractions that are fun for all ages with activities such as Indoor Go Karts, Bowling, Laser Tag, Escape Rooms, Ropes Courses, Arcade and Redemption, Sports Simulators, Axe Throwing, Mini Golf, Bumper Cars, Virtual Reality and state-of-the-art event meeting space. Each location offers a full-service dining experience in The Pit Stop Tavern, with a menu that includes 80 gluten-free options as well as vegetarian options.
“Relying on Excel to manage our financial processes handicapped us more than helped us. We needed a solution that gave us insight into how to fix problems and enabled us to manage our business in real-time.”
Marcus Kemblowski
COO
Apex Entertainment
Challenge
Move away from spreadsheet-based budgeting, forecasting and reporting for more insight into the operations of the business.
Solution
Workday Adaptive Planning
Benefits
- Managers can easily enter their numbers and are assured the calculations are correct
- Forecasts by location and by type of activity
- Reduce time and manual effort spent gathering data across multiple systems, tables and spreadsheets
- Elegant, customized reports
- Gain insights into revenue and operations based on accurate budgeting, forecasting and reporting
Berks Homes in a League of Their Own with Enterprise Planning Using Workday Adaptive Planning
Berks Homes has been building homes since 1973, offering homes that combine practicality with inspiration. Berks Homes prides itself on building homes that “just feel right.” Today the company builds quality-made homes across Eastern Pennsylvania, in Berks County, Chester County, Lancaster County, Lebanon County and more.
“We are now using Workday Adaptive Planning for many strategic finance activities. Not only do we have more timely and comprehensive reports, but we are also saving an incredible amount of time. Previously it would take 10-15 hours for our team to gather the data. Now we can collect the data we need and perform the analysis and reporting in just four hours.”
Joe Campbell
Controller
Berks Homes
Challenge
Move to a sophisticated, but easy-to-use FP&A solution to deliver insights that the company can use to have accurate and up-to-date cash flow forecasting to manage strategic growth.
Solution
Workday Adaptive Planning
Benefits
- Provide senior management and other stakeholders with visibility into financial performance, cash flow and more
- Integrated with data from MarkSystems, a home building ERP software platform
- Reduce time and manual effort spent gathering data across multiple systems, tables and spreadsheets
- Self-service options for frontline managers and senior leadership
- One source of the truth, with integrated and updated forecasts and reports
Unified Planning and Reporting with IBM Planning Analytics
This unique asset management firm consists of boutique investment managers and offers its clients high-quality investment strategies. The company has a multi-manager, multi-strategy approach to meeting the needs of different types of clients and to generate compelling performance.
“We had unique requirements, specifically for our Assets Under Management and Revenue Models and that’s why we selected IBM Planning Analytics. The backbone of IBM Planning Analytics is TM1, a mature, battle-tested solution.”
Vice President of Financial Planning & Analytics
Challenge
Create one comprehensive forecasting, planning and reporting solution from multiple data sources.
Solution
IBM Planning Analytics integrated with a Workday General Ledger and custom models.
Benefits
- Empowers senior managers with immediate access to high integrity data
- Serves as the primary source for public reporting
- Eliminates manual processes and automates many financial reporting requirements
- Consolidates data from multiple sources into a single version of the truth
- Enables timely and accurate financial forecasts
Rayonier Makes Better Use of Resources with IBM Planning Analytics
Rayonier, a real estate investment trust (REIT), is one of the largest private landowners in the U.S. The company owns, leases or manages approximately 2.7 million acres of timberlands in the U.S. South, U.S. Pacific Northwest.
“Activities that used to take several days can now be done in less than a day. We have more visibility, and we’ve pushed planning down to more individuals. People are now much closer to the process. And overall, people are much more productive.”
Bill Tan
Senior Accounting Manager
Rayonier
Challenge
Rayonier wanted to move away from the myriad of budgeting, finance and reporting systems it was using across multiple divisions onto one single, more easily used and managed solution.
Solution
Revelwood built several custom, complex models using IBM Planning Analytics to incorporate unique aspects of Rayonier’s business, such as timber harvests and land sales, while also streamlining activities that were previously cumbersome.
Benefits
- Streamlined processes with faster and more efficient close processes
- Greater visibility, increased participation and more ownership
- Significant hard and soft financial savings
Leveraging Complex Modeling in IBM Planning Analytics at New York Blood Center
Transforming financial planning and reporting for one of the largest independent, community-based blood centers in the country enables Finance to be seen as a value-added partner to the organization.
“With easy access to such powerful financial information in IBM Planning Analytics, Finance is seen as a value-added partner to our businesses and is able to support them in making strategic decisions that will enable us to meet our growth objectives.”
Beth Gibson
CFO
New York Blood Center
Challenge
New York Blood Center needed to completely overhaul its financial reporting system and processes in order to deliver more accurate, consistent and timelier information to its senior executives and Board of Directors.
Solution
Revelwood built several custom and complex models in IBM Planning Analytics to incorporate data from disparate systems into one fast and comprehensive planning and reporting solution.
Benefits
- Regular and timely monthly reporting with greater detail and visibility for line-of-business managers, senior directors and the Board of Directors.
- Easy integration with other systems to report on strategic merger and acquisition activities.
- The ability to perform complex modeling and forecasting, allocations and driver-based planning, enabling more accurate reporting on revenues and expenses by department.
Regency Energizes Budgeting and Reporting with IBM Cognos TM1 and Revelwood
A financial performance management solution with minimal IT resources for a publicly traded energy company significantly reduces man-hours spent on the budgeting process.
“Our monthly variance process is now substantially smoother. We’ve easily reduced our time spent budgeting by at least half.”
Tina Cone
Manager of Budgeting and Analysis
Regency Energy Transfer
Challenge
Regency had a long budgeting process, complicated by dealing with reports and budgets from more than 100 departments. In many cases the divisions had different formats and processes for budgeting. Relying on Excel resulted in version control issues, no central repository for budgeting information and an inability to collaborate. The cumbersome budgeting process offered little time or accurate data for in-depth analysis.
Solution
Regency selected IBM Cognos TM1 as a financial performance management solution for its finance department and many divisions. TM1 serves as a common platform for storing, monitoring and analyzing financial information across the company. Revelwood developed the models and cubes for the TM1 applications, taught the finance team to develop their own cubes and dimensions and trained the end user community on using the new TM1-based applications.
Benefits
- An estimated 50% reduction in man-hours spent on monthly budgeting.
- One consolidated solution for all budgeting data, delivering better consistency and transparency of data.
- A smoother budgeting process, eliminating version control issues.
- Empowers key team members with the skills and knowledge to develop new financial performance management applications.
- A foundation for rolling out financial performance management on an operational level to more than 100 departments and two different general ledger systems.
Modernizing FP&A Systems for Speed of Business Forecasting
This financial services firm’s FP&A “secret sauce” is so secret, they didn’t want to share their company name with the competition. But they did want to share their success working with IBM Planning Analytics and Revelwood.
“Working with Revelwood was awesome. The hands-on consultants working with us were incredibly responsive. From the get-go, the Revelwood team had a great ability to understand what we needed.”
Vice President of Finance
Challenge
Create one comprehensive forecasting solution for multiple aspects of a financial services firm.
Solution
IBM Planning Analytics and Revelwood Lightspeed with custom models for forecasting.
Benefits
- Ability to forecast on a weekly basis, with fewer errors
- More comprehensive and complex forecasting
- More efficient ad hoc analysis
- Easier board slide creation
- Closer relationships with departments outside of Finance