Controlling Systems Applications

Eureca

Studies show that for 64% of the time, financial controllers are busy collecting data, 15% - analysing thereof, and 21% - reporting to the Management. Nowadays, the basic tool of controllers’ work is a spreadsheet – thus, among other things, such breakdown of working time...

The EURECA system combines in itself:

• data warehouse functionality – thanks to which it easily integrates with solutions that are already in place in the company, and it does not require any changes to the existing IT infrastructure
• Excel’s flexibility and ergonomics – thanks to the use of ready-made components of MS Office, moving within tables with data is identical as in MS Excel.

Due to the above, the time needed to train users in the projects we run usually does not exceed 2-3 days.

EURECA eliminates “gluing together” of the Company’s budget from tens or hundreds of spreadsheets (a phenomenon which today is a pain for many controllers) – all information entered by managers at the stage of budgeting gets immediately saved in the database.

The system is tailored, among other things, to support organizations that are dispersed in many places (such as banks, insurance companies, store chains) – Users can follow their plan and its execution and enter data on the plans via Web. The application can handle international companies thanks to the easy tailoring of reports and analyses to the group’s standards, both with respect to the language and the format .

The multilanguage nature of the application allows to conduct work on the budget in any language. The multilanguage version is very flexible and it does not have any linguistic limitations. In an especially developed system table, all names of fields and messages occurring in the system have been gathered. The table allows EURECA’s users to translate those names on their own to any language they would like to handle the application in. Due to the demand being big, two versions are currently available: the English one and the German one.

FUNCTIONALITY

The EURECA system consists of 2 modules:

• BUDGETING MODULE - it enables creating and checking on the execution of the organization’s budget in many measures, cross-sections and periods
• ANALYSES MODULE – it enables conducting multidimensional analysis of planned and performed data and ad-hoc queries which allow to carry out any analyses at all, even very untypical ones

BUDGETING MODULE

A module which aids the budgeting process in the Company; it allows to create and check on the execution of the organization’s budget in a manner that is:

• Multidimensional – thanks to that, we can e.g. manage the sales budget being broken down into market segments, regions, and product ranges at the same time;
• Multi-measure - thanks to that, we can plan and monitor many measures for one phenomenon AT THE SAME TIME – e.g. the quantity, value and average selling price, the cost and number of man-hours or the number of full-time positions;
• Multi-period – thanks to that, we are not limited by the annual accounting period, we can manage e.g. budgets of projects which last from November to April, or investments which take 27 months.

ANALYSES MODULE

Inventory systems collect immense amounts of data, but usually they do not have the tools to process them into useful information and knowledge. The EURECA system fills that gap in the information system of the enterprise. Thanks to the technology applied, EURECA is able to filter data and analyse its structure in any way chosen.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL DATA ANALYSIS

Due to the special nature of the issues handled, that part of the EURECA system which allows to carry out comprehensive analyses related to both planned and historic data can occur regardless of the budgeting module.

Many Users simply need a good tool for analysing phenomena taking place in the company, which would allow to reach management information in a fast and efficient way. The demand for this kind of information in every company is immense. There is a whole list of questions that in a typical enterprise are not easy to answer at all.

“Which products have the biggest share in the operating profit? Do they sell the same way in all regions and periods? Which sales teams have the best results in the sales thereof? Which Clients buy the biggest amounts of them? What affects the cost of manufacturing them the most? How much do we spend on their promotion as compared with other products? How much does it cost to conclude one trading transaction in individual product groups as compared with the average margin? Who are our 10 largest suppliers? What is the share of our transactions with them in our total costs? How do the 10 best products affect the operating profit? What do our overhead costs consist of? Which component thereof has the strongest effect on the company’s profit and who is it managed by?"

Management boards of almost all enterprises ask themselves that sort of questions. Inventory systems collect huge amounts of data, but they do not have tools for processing them into useful information and knowledge. The EURECA system fills that gap in the information system of the enterprise.

Owing to the technology applied, EURECA is able to filter data and analyse its structure in any way chosen. It is fascinating to observe how some synthetic information, e.g. on the level of a company’s sales, is broken down from one amount to component parts – by regions, product range groups, salespeople, salespeople and regions, salespeople and product range groups, product range groups and sales channels, etc. Thanks to the EURECA system, information gets “alive” , it presents the mode of operation of the whole company and its smallest organization units; strengths and weaknesses of the organization; points in which something needs to be improved; reasons for failures and successes.

EURECA also enables top-down analysis – which is very important for managers. During deployment, the so-called measurement hierarchies can be defined, for example “gmina - poviat - voivodship – region”, or “index - product – product range - category". Thanks to that, during the analysis of data we see its structure and relationships on its individual levels. Depending on what is needed, it is, of course, possible to carry out analyses down to the most minute details.