Simon’s not alone, and you don’t need to be either

after 6 years a R100 million problem went unnoticed and here’s what Simon did to prevent that from happening again

In order to know how he solved it,

you need to know WHY it happened.

ERP’s don’t solve all business needs

While most ERP systems are great tools for managing large business needs and the reporting functionality is great for operational needs, they seldom have the capability to satisfy management reports that have specific needs or needs that change over time.

Simon had the need to merge information from a variety of systems in order to produce a reconciliation report. This meant that Simon had to export information from the ERP system and merge the data in an Excel report. (this is the point where some begin to blame Excel – hint, it’s not an Excel issue).

The real problem was that there was no way to check that what Simon was producing as the Recon report was actually correct. In the first year of producing the report there weren’t any mistakes, but as time went by, slowly small mistakes started to show up. The high volume of transactions coupled with the value of those transactions grew, and over the next 6 years, a mistake of over R100 million was recorded.

Simon also inherited this process so it made it even more difficult for him to go back in time and check the numbers so he accepted it as truth.

Simon never thought for a moment that his work was wrong or that there was a different way to do this

Our business solutions are NOT something that business users are out searching for so when we first approached Simon he wasn’t interested. He was confident that he did not have any reporting issues and while getting the reports done quicker, at the click of a button, sounded great, the investment just wasn’t worth it.

We solve the problem of the time it takes to produce reports and the limitations created by manually interventions when exporting data to create reports, complex or simple.

After three years of conversation, Simon agreed for us to do a small project. The Reconciliation reports were starting to take up more days than he liked and so that was what we were asked to analyse and present a solution for. Through our analysis, we started to find discrepancies hidden deep in the detail. This was caused mainly by copying and pasting of values for previous months on a large data set that led to the issue.

It sounds crazy, I know

It took 3 years before Simon started working with us

So HOW did he solve it

He let go of the mundane task of collecting and merging information

He worked with experts that understood he’s desire and need to keep reports in Excel

He invested in technology that allowed him the flexibility he wanted with all the power of analytics

There are three ways we help our customers

Training

Consulting

Products

There is no way we can know if our solutions can work for you. The BEST way to establish that is for us to have a conversation.

Book an Online discussion to understand in more detail how our solutions work and if there’s a possibility that we can work together to simplify your reports