Success Stories

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

When we asked how the customer manages delivery, pat came the response, "Delivery priority is only based on the customer who is screaming most!" Although it was hard to believe, the customer explained the reasons behind the problem. Quite often they used to discover that when the machine is in the shop floor for assembly, important raw materials have not arrived. Equipments worth crores of rupees had to be held up in the assembly line for want of some raw materials costing hardly few thousand bucks! This clearly meant that they were not able to manage inventory as well and procure them at the right time.

Environment

The customer was using excel sheets other than the financial accounting system for maintaining accounts. However, customer was unable to get his problems resolved and was considering going for an ERP system.

Cindrel's solution

Cindrel implemented eyeTprofit to provide the customer with the following solutions:

1. Streamlining and monitoring the project planning process

With project planning reports from eyeTprofit, the customer review meetings have become very effective as they got automated project status mail every week across projects. This resulted in achieving effective planning and tracking of their projects.

2. Tracking the procurement of raw materials project wise

They were able to monitor the inventory on a project-wise basis and also were getting alerts on purchase orders that were overdue and purchase orders that were already placed.

3. Monitoring the projectwise inventory against estimation

Cindrel's eyeTprofit provides the customer with reports that provide specific insight into raw materials that have been estimated, ordered, unordered, received and pending receipt for each of their projects.

4. Optimizing the investment levels on inventory

With dead, slow and fast-moving stocks identified, they are now able to optimize their investment levels and stock optimal quantity of inventory across projects.

Benefits

The customer today vouches for the value that Cindrel has added. They are able to manage inventory, procure materials on time based on the alerts sent by eyeTprofit, manage project planning effectively and also optimize their investment levels by holding optimal quantity of stocks when needed.

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

During pre-sales we asked the managing director of a textile company who was our prospect - "What information do you get in time, what is that you do not get in time and what is that you get with great difficulty?" "Information?", asked the customer. "I do not even know the turnover of my company - Sales tells one figure, accounts tell another, while IT tells a totally different one!", came the shocking response. "We have started distrusting IT systems now-a-days. I think manual reports are more reliable!", he continued explaining. In addition to this, the customer faced a unique problem. Owing to weather conditions, the raw material (yarn) could gain or lose weight and this loss or gain in weight was not captured anywhere. Also, when raw materials and semi-finished goods were sent to sub-contractors for processing, many orders were clubbed together and given to take advantage of economies of scale. This made the problem more challenging.

Environment

The customer was having an ERP system implemented for their main processing activities. They also had a project planning and tracking system, a production system in addition to other systems like time-keeping and attendance systems.

Cindrel's solution

We realized that the reports from the core systems were either inaccurate or the system implementation was not perfect enough. We also realized that for providing useful information for the management, it is essential to aggregate the multiple sets of information lying across different systems. In a matter of couple of months, we were able to aggregate all the information from their ERP systems, financial accounting systems, attendance systems, planning system and production system and enabled them to track customer orders from quotation stage to delivery. We provided them with profitability analysis at different dimensions - order level, customer level, etc drilldown-able to the voucher transaction level, in addition to giving them basic reports like order summary, sales summary, Budget Vs Actuals, inventory details, weight loss reports etc.. We provided the customer with relevant business alerts and enabled the management to get automated reports on a periodic basis. In fact, as part of the implementation, lot of anomaly was noticed in the data capture in the base ERP systems which was picked up on an exceptional basis and reported. This made the customer correct some of the problem at its root level.

Benefits

Overall, the customer has started getting confidence on IT systems and he sees eyeTprofit reports on a daily basis. Today, he hardly depends on his people to provide reports as he gets his reports automatically by mail or knows pretty well that he can view his important reports any time through eyeTprofit installed in his laptop and desk PC. Most importantly, he relies on these reports for decision making.

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

The customer is a manufacturing company engaged in the production of textile materials for overseas market. The company found that there was lot of scope for cost control and cost reduction. But, in the absence of an unified system, they were not able to consistently monitor performance and identify variances. They desperately required costing and variance reports on the utilization of materials, labour and overheads. Although, they had a bill of material and cost sheet for every customer order, they were unable to monitor the actual performance for want of a proper recording system. They tried evaluating many ERP applications, and found that, lot of customization was required to make it fit, for their company. The ERP vendors also required them to list out all of their reporting requirements in advance, for them to customize the application, as subsequent amendments could be technically difficult and costly. Because of the above constraints, they were unable to take a firm decision to switch over to a different system.

Environment

Accounting and Inventory transactions were maintained in a Financial Accounting system. For capture of movement of goods between stores and shop floor and also capture of production data, they were maintaining data in Excel Sheets.

Cindrel's solution

We provided the solution in the following manner.
1. Design of standard templates in Excel for Bill of Materials
2. Design of a simple template in Ms-Access for monitoring the movement of goods within Factory in the following flow :
  Goods Receipt -> Batch Creation -> Stores Issue -> Goods Return -> Stores Return
3. Design of a simple template in Ms-Access for capture of Hour wise, Order wise, Machine Wise, Process Wise production information.
4. Defining rules for Cost Allocation and Apportionment
5. Import of Data from transaction system
6. Definition of Expenditure Budgets and monitoring Variances.
eyeTprofit integrated Data from transaction system, Excel and Access into a single database from which extensive analysis was enabled. The whole implementation process took about couple of months and it enabled the customer to design a system which was very flexible as well as powerful enough to enable analysis of their performance. "With couple of days training, our people have been able to create new reports on their own. Now, we are able to generate any report instantaneously, which has enabled us to be more efficient in our operations. With well-defined, access rights, users get to see only reports relevant to them", explains the CFO today. Some of the key reports generated through eyeTprofit include: Customer Order Wise Resource Utilisation Report Costing Reports- Cost Centre Wise Cost Apportionment and Cost Allocation. Productivity Reports on Labour and Machines

Benefits

The features of building Adhoc Queries, Drill down from Macro level to micro level, 360Degree view of any key data, analysis through Pivots etc., now enable the customer, to take informed decisions with validated data. Especially, Scheduled Email reminders and rule based exception reports, has made the top management less reliant on the operational staff for reports. "We can say that with the implementation of eyeTprofit, we are able to get the benefits of an integrated ERP system. The advantage is all the more pronounced, as the same has happened with little or no change to our existing transaction capture processes", the CEO of the company says proudly.

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

The customer is a manufacturing company engaged in manufacturing medical instruments. The customer faced challenges in managing receivables from customers and dealers. They had laid out collection plans for salesmen. However, they were not able to proactively monitor and track collections effectively. In an attempt to bring this under control, they have even restricted sales incentives only for pending invoices that are collected in time by the salesmen. This made the sales incentive calculation quite challenging as well. Also, they were planning to implement and CRM system at that time and was wondering how they could get to see aggregated information across these different systems.

Environment

Accounting and Inventory transactions were maintained in a Financial Accounting system. They were using excel sheets to set targets and calculate incentives for sales men. They were in the process of implementing a CRM system as well.

Cindrel's solution

We provided the solution in the following manner.

1. Monitoring the outstanding collections salesman-wise

This report comes useful in letting each salesman know the pending collections from his dealers. This has enabled their salesman to proactively follow up for outstanding amount from each dealer.

2. Monitoring the outstanding collections dealer-wise

With this report they are able to monitor the dealer wise outstanding and categorize them into configurable buckets and are able to actively follow-up for payments

3. Incentive calculation for Sales man.

Earlier, calculation of sales man incentives was quite difficult and was prepared manually with great effort. With Cindrel's eyeTprofit installed, they are able to generate the inventive report anytime with the click of a button

4. Self Sufficient

We have also trained the customer to become self-sufficient and they are able to create new reports all by themselves.

Benefits

Cindrel has empowered the top management with information in their hands. They have started using their team effectively instead of making them work through multiple excel sheets in aggregating information across different systems. "Kudos to Cindrel for creating such a great product and for the professional service offered to us!", says the director of this firm.

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

The customer is a leading chemical manufacturer having two units in India.The customer is a leading chemical manufacturer having two units in India. The most important challenge was to get year-till-date product wise profitability taking into account the direct costs, indirect costs and arrive at a cost per kilogram sold across their different products. They were spending close to 17 man days every month to generate this report to the top management. The top management considered this report as one of their most important report. The input for the report came from multiple sources like financial accounting systems, dispatch registers, production registers, stock registers, incentive sheets, pump maintenance sheets and much more.

Environment

Accounting and Inventory transactions were maintained in a Financial Accounting system. They were using excel sheets for everything else including production, dispatch, costing, maintenance, asset management etc.

Cindrel's solution

Cindrel has provided immense value to the customer by enabling the customer to generate the year-till-date product-wise profitability report at the click of a button! The sales information and other revenue information was consolidated from the financial accounting systems (installed in the manufacturing units), the direct costs attributable to each product was arrived at and each cost element was analyzed and accounted for - this included cost of raw materials, packing materials, transportation, labour, dispatch to customer, etc where the cost could be directly attributed to a customer and a product. The indirect costs were apportioned based on the nature of the expense in consultation with their accounts head based on their traditional costing practices. Cindrel also provided them a facility to arrive at the actual consumption of materials based on their budgeted norms (or BOM - bill of materials) and enabled the customer to compare cost per kilogram of sales against the budgeted cost per kilogram of sales - month on month, year till date, etc. Cindrel also provided these reports in the customer's own standard excel template and automated delivery of this report to the CEO's desk on a periodic basis. Having realized the power of the solution, the customer today has got several reports implemented and has realized a lot of benefits which also resulted in saving a lot of time and effort by their already overloaded staff.

Benefits

Cindrel has empowered the top management with information in their hands. They have started using their team effectively instead of making them work through multiple excel sheets in aggregating information across different systems. "We haven't seen such a solution in the last 20 years in this industry. I will definitely recommend this to many of my colleagues in other companies," the customer proudly says today.

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

The customer is a retail chain store selling white goods across 16 branches in Tamil Nadu. The top management had little visibility beyond the turnover of the company. They had to depend on their IT team to get details on brand-wise sales, product-wise sales, model-wise sales, etc Also, being a highly competitive market, they had to work on meager margins with high investment levels. They had to focus on selling the right products to enhance profitability as the net landing cost of the products were based on volumes procured from the different supplier companies in the given time period. Also, with frequently announced schemes from different suppliers, keeping the team informed of the changes to sales prices and keeping track of profitability became a nightmare Overall, the management was not having a real grasp of the business without supporting information.

Environment

A foxpro based system was implemented in the various branches. This captured the basic retail POS operations, purchase, inventory and accounts as well. However, each branch resorted to implementing the system quite differently making consolidation quite challenging.

Cindrel's solution

Cindrel helped in streamlining the data capture by providing bridge solutions that worked. Cindrel provided exception reports to the customer to enable them to maintain consistency of data across the different branches. Cindrel also provided multiple input formats (in excel sheets) to capture missing information that were necessary to provide the reports that the management was looking for. Cindrel automated the import process across the different branches and trained the team to maintain consistency of data.
Some of the reports provided through eyeTprofit are:
1. Profitability Reports: Determining the profitability at a branch level, product level, brand level year-wise, etc
2. Sales Performance Analysis: Determine the sales of products, brands, models, etc across branches
3. Loss Making Sales - Alerts when sales are made at a loss.
4. Sales Return Reports - Analyze the returns on sales across branches, products etc
5. Debtor Outstanding Reports - Analyze the outstanding receivables from debtors across different branches
6. Stock ageing reports - Slow moving and Dead Stock: Optimize the investment levels by identifying slow moving and dead stock.
7. Expenses Analysis - Analyze and optimize expenses across branches

Benefits

Today the entire team, not only the top management, sees eyeTprofit report. The management has made it mandatory to use eyeTprofit reports for all verification and discussions. The headache of consolidating discrete and unorganized information is a thing of the past. Cindrel has provided a game-changing solution without disturbing their existing systems.

Challenges faced by Customer (Prior to implementing eyeTprofit)

Customers in cement distribution business often have multiple entities for selling different brands of cement according to supplier's policies. However, the sales team is usually common and they work across the different entities to sell different brands of cement. Typically, the distributors do not stock and sell; rather they book orders and place bulk orders with suppliers and manage deliveries. Deliveries are managed through own vehicles, hired vehicles or customer picks from supplier transit point. The challenges faced by these customers are usually sales management, sales incentive management and accounts receivables. Their biggest challenges are in consolidating their overall performance across the multiple entities and analyze the trend of profitability in their business.

Environment

Most cement distributors have a financial accounting system to maintain sales and purchases. They typically maintain vehicle registers in excel sheets for monitoring vehicle movements. They maintain sales incentive schemes in excel sheets.

Cindrel's solution

Cindrel provided them with formats for data capture that is outside of the financial accounting system. Cindrel provided the following solutions:
1. Automated import of data from financial accounting system and other excel sheets.
2. Sales performance across entities, brand-wise, model-wise drilldown-able to the transaction level
3. Sales contribution analysis
4. Outstanding receivables customer-wise, salesman wise
5. Salesman incentive calculations
6. Trend analysis of sales across years
7. Comparison reports of sales across months.

Benefits

Customers are able to get consolidated performance across their multiple entities at the click of a button. Calculation of sales incentives for salesmen working across multiple entities is done regularly through eyeTprofit. Vehicle tracking and usage monitoring has become easy now.