50% faster budgeting and forecasting cycle with connection to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central

Historically, Cortina’s daily and monthly sales information was input manually using Excel. This tedious data consolidation process took substantial time and effort—delaying both analysis and insight. Additionally, sales data in Excel were often inaccurate due to a lack of systematic checks to find and fix errors.

Cortina’s Finance team needed up-to-date, daily sales information at the store level to perform meaningful analyses and reviews. And to improve store sales, they required more accurate data for better forecasts, planning, and budgeting.

However, instead of conducting the analyses needed to get those in-depth insights, the team spent significant time reviewing and inputting data into required reports.

In 2022, Cortina migrated its on-premises Dynamics to MS Cloud Business Central and adopted the Jedox planning and performance platform. Attain, a Cortina partner, also implemented Jedox for management reporting.

This new reporting consolidates and reports subsidiaries’ business performance data along with store performance across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia. Cortina enhanced its mobile dashboard to provide more insightful reports and included information about purchases and inventories.

With the Jedox Mobile App, individual store managers and those at the management level were able to aggregate store and brand information monthly and annually. It simplified their access to reports, dashboards, and Jedox Views—allowing them to securely update and search information, share data, and provide feedback. With Jedox, the quality of reported data improved significantly.

As a result, Cortina expanded Jedox use to nearly seven times the number of people across the organization since the Attain implementation provided immediate return on investment (ROI). In 2023, Attain implemented the Jedox budgeting and forecasting module for Cortina, further increasing the ROI of the Jedox platform.

With the Jedox platform, Cortina now relies on a single source of truth in sales and management reporting. This means the data is validated and credible, and any incorrect, duplicated, or redundant information is excluded.

With consolidated data and automated extraction and transformation processes, Cortina benefits from accurate and seamless retrieval for actual basis, planning, budgeting, and analyses.

With Jedox, Cortina conducts driver-based budgeting, scenario analyses, budget reviews, forecasts, and business plan development in a dynamic business environment. The organization spends 50% less time on reporting, planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Plus, performance data from stores, such as sales, gross margin, purchases, and inventories, is always up to date. As a result, the Finance team can focus on reviewing and analyzing data to support better business decisions—while store managers gain vital insights to guide their choices.

“We can maximize our revenue through understanding store-level performance. As a result, we now plan better the allocation of luxury watches to boost retail performance.”

Kenny Wong, Assistant Group CFO

Under the new Singapore Exchange (SGX) sustainability requirements, Cortina is also considering using Attain and the Jedox platform to help with financial consolidation and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting.