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After a private equity firm acquired Aurora Plastics in 2016, the Ohio-based manufacturer made five acquisitions in six years. For Aurora Plastics to scale, they hired Joe Morris as their base-division Financial Controller to improve their finance function.
Aurora Plastics had worked on offline Excel spreadsheets that were distributed via email. It took hours to convert the financials of acquired entities and add them to their legacy workbook.
Acquisitions created bigger spreadsheets, which led to data inaccuracies, version control issues and unbalanced accounts. Every month-end required six hours of inputting actuals manually.
“Anytime that we would add on an acquisition, we would have to do a tremendous amount of work,” Joe said. “You'd get into a meeting and the Operations team would be working off a different version than the Finance team.”
Joe knew they needed a solution to quickly consolidate the data from their new entities and prepare for anticipated acquisitions. As a “big data company,” he wanted to establish process standardization for their five manufacturing locations and five financial controllers.
Aurora Plastics began the Vena implementation process in late summer 2021 and were up and running in time for budget season that year.
With data consolidation, workflows and templates for budgeting, reporting and forecasting—all automated—their 41 users are now analyzing the same, trusted real-time numbers as new entities merged.
“From a management standpoint, instead of going out and looking at five different reconciliations or five different processes, we’re looking at one process, so we know that there's consistency. We know we can trust the process,” Joe said.
It saved their finance team at least six hours of non-value-adding work every month and many more on integrating new entities into reports. This has allowed Joe to perform more analysis on sales forecasting, buying and pricing.
While he chose Vena for its Excel-native interface and automated data consolidation, Joe recognized that the complete planning platform could improve Aurora Plastics’ demand planning, too.
Before Vena, Joe could only analyze summary customer-level data. This meant that when collaborating with the Purchasing team, Finance could plan demand only one month ahead. Now with Vena’s automated, drillable reporting, they have access to transaction-level data. Joe can now provide the Purchasing team with confident sales projections—based on real-time sales data and not historical averages—for the next 12 months.
This data is also filterable by SKU, sales representative and customer segment to name a few. Aurora Plastics can then buy raw materials with greater cost efficiency and forecast commissions with greater accuracy.
For a couple of years now, Aurora Plastics—like everybody else—have been hit with hyperinflation in their business. But with Vena, having real-time insights into their financial performance, KPIs and other metrics helped them identify risks and take corrective action sooner.
“The forecasting that we've moved into Vena allowed us to stay on top of that hyperinflation and make sure our margins weren't being squeezed, and that we had the proper response to the inflation so that we can maintain our shareholder value,” said Joe.
Now as their Vice President of Finance, Corporate Controller (Aurora Plastics promoted Joe shortly after the Vena implementation) his 2023 focus is cost management.
“We're going to really shift our focus as a finance team to give reporting in detail to our operations team to really help them drive improvements on the spend side,” he said. “We have our sales and forecasting and pricing all squared away in Vena. It's the operations team’s turn next to see the benefits of the system. And we're really looking forward to seeing what kind of results we can drive there.”
Aurora Plastics recently acquired another company and this time, Joe was able to fully integrate this latest acquisition in the company’s planning and reporting in less than a month.
Delivering “a consistent product for the end user” through Vena’s tight integration with Power BI has helped secure buy-in from teams outside the finance department. It also positioned Aurora Plastics’ finance team as innovators within the business.
“It provides a way to show that the finance team is looking for improvements too. We, as a finance team, are looking for ways to constantly be better and do our jobs better. And Vena allowed us to do that,” said Joe.
“My favorite part of my job is seeing results; starting something, identifying an issue, identifying a solution to that issue, implementing the solution and then seeing the results. If you're not improving, you're falling behind. So that's what keeps me going: the ability to go in and change something for the better every day.”