Natick, MA – August 5, 2013 –Centage™ Corporation, a leading provider of budgeting and forecasting software (Budget Maestro™) for small and medium sized businesses, today announced Wagner Asia Equipment LLC, a leading dealer of Caterpillar Corporation in Mongolia, successfully streamlined the budgeting and forecasting process and met stringent data governance requirements by relying on Budget Maestro. Within just 8 weeks, 17 business units across all 5 Wagner Asia Group companies, representing 131 entities were up and running on Budget Maestro. By automating the process, it now takes only a matter of weeks to develop an accurate and comprehensive budget, versus the previous spreadsheet method which took months, and provides an efficient process for rolling each budget into a single, comprehensive budget for the entire company. As the company anticipated rapid, continued growth, this level of visibility was critical to helping Wagner
“We’re a Six Sigma company,” said Daniel Lien, general manager, Office of Strategic Management, Wagner Asia. “So we used the Six Sigma methodology, which consists of a very, disciplined approach including a deep analytical dive, to find the best long term solution for a problem. After much research, we found Budget Maestro was only solution to meet our scalability and data governance needs.”
Managing with Excel – Mounting Challenges; Hindering Growth
Wagner Asia has a history of excellence. For six years in a row, the company has been a leading Caterpillar dealer in Sales and Service Capability Performances in the CIS and Mongolia region. However, like many companies, Wagner Asia relied on spreadsheets as its “budgeting software.” Unfortunately, the company experienced the usual headaches when budgeting with spreadsheets – challenges consolidating budgets, questionable data and broken macros and formulas. Just the process of submitting budgets for approval was cumbersome and inefficient. The challenges were magnified by the fact that Wagner Asia had nearly 20 people involved in the annual budgeting process.
But Wagner Asia’s biggest challenge was that spreadsheets simply didn’t allow for the scalability to support company growth which included increasing the number of people managing the budget to nearly 50, and employing stronger checks and balances to ensure the budgets submitted, came only from the appropriate, approved individuals. The company needed a more strategic way to manage their budget. In addition, Wagner Asia was considering a change in its ERP system. Therefore, it was critical that the new budgeting software would seamlessly connect to and work with a number of different ERP systems.
Better Data Governance and Streamlined Budget Development
After due diligence, Wagner Asia found Budget Maestro was the only solution on the market to meet their needs and began using Budget Maestro‘s ETL tool, Link Maestro to enable seamless data integration with their SAGE ERP system, ACCPAC. By relying on Link Maestro, Lien and his team can now quickly, reliably and securely transfer data to and from Budget Maestro and automate the import of their actuals at any time, to compare to plan, budget, forecast, or any scenario for variance analysis. Most importantly, since Wagner Asia is using Link Maestro to extract the data from ACCPAC and load into Budget Maestro, there is no question of the data’s validity. Link Maestro eliminates the potential for human error and mis-keying numbers. In addition, the unprecedented level of granularity, allows division managers to dig deep into their individual divisions and gain valuable insight at any given moment, to more strategically manage the business.
“Budget Maestro gives us the level of data governance we require, but didn’t find in any other solution on the market today,” commented Lien. “Not only that, it also provides us with an unquestionable audit trail. This is critical to better manage our company as we plan for continued growth throughout our region.”
