Accent Group accelerates budgeting process by 98%

Working with a culture of bottom-up, detailed planning, Excel was always used to produce budgets at Accent Group. Excel was fine when working with 20 stores, but in the past three years alone, the group has grown massively to more than 400 stores. It became increasingly impossible to work solely using Excel. As the organization grew, Excel cube and Power Pivot were deployed for month-end reporting. However, given that it runs different finance Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) across the group, it was challenging to produce a consolidated view. In the budget processes used in previous years, the group would run macros that would take as long as 30 minutes to an hour to complete.

The project kicked off with Cornerstone as the implementation partner. The first focus was to get key components for the budget to start the fiscal year budgeting process, with 80% of the budget model completed within a month. Once the budget model was finalized, Accent Group began working on a re-forecasting model and building out its month-end reporting capability within Jedox. All month-end reports today are produced using the Jedox solution.

Having all the information in one place makes it much easier for Accent Group to perform ad hoc reporting. Before Jedox, it was challenging, as wholesale data had to be extracted separately and stored in a separate Excel cube instance, and it was difficult even to produce a complete full-year view. Moreover, it was time-consuming, taking up to a full hour to run macros during the planning and budgeting process. With the implementation of Jedox, uploading to the database now takes only a minute through an interface that the group’s internal IT team helped prepare. This meant that the entire budgeting process sped up by almost 100%.

With Jedox, Accent Group has saved time preparing the report and extracting data, freeing up more capacity to do analysis and focus on fine-tuning other financial aspects of the group. All month-end reports are generated more accurately with a simple click of a button. Moving forward, the team plans to expand the use of Jedox and produce an omnichannel view of the entire group. This is part of Accent Group’s strategic transformation program to initiate FP&A improvements in people, processes, and technology to increase operational efficiency, improve profitability, and better manage operational risks.