Project Worldwide achieves 30-minute cost elimination process for 43 offices in 23 countries

Project Worldwide had reached its limits with its legacy performance management software. Although the solution was a step up from Excel at the time, it presented significant challenges for the team. “We couldn’t run automatic foreign exchange (FX) rate conversions for profits, so we performed a manual process that was difficult for our foreign entities,” recalls Bobby Rays, Senior Financial Analyst at Project Worldwide. “They entered their numbers natively, but then waited an hour for us to run a manual process to convert them to U.S. dollars. We received many complaints about data latency and the user experience.”

Report building within the legacy system was also tedious and time consuming. This would be a challenge for any organization – but for a complex global collective such as Project Worldwide, these issues affected multiple agencies and team members across several countries. The system limited the team’s data views, making it difficult to produce custom templates. When they were able to spend time building a custom template, updating it was a nightmare because they also needed to update multiple data views hidden in the back end.

When the team considered upgrading their existing solution versus implementing Jedox, they could not justify the cost of their legacy solution. Project Worldwide got started with Jedox and then went live with the solution across 27 entities in 43 offices and 23 countries. For the first time, everyone had easy access to real-time, cross-organizational data and powerful self-service capabilities.

Because Project Worldwide has diverse agencies in its portfolio, they needed to integrate multiple different data sources. In the past, each agency ran its own set of books, and they paid a third-party software provider for open database connectivity (ODBC). Because the Jedox platform is designed to integrate with any source, the team was able to cut out the middleman and get a complete picture of its data within one platform.

“We received a lot of compliments after moving to Jedox. It’s saving everyone so much time, and it’s much easier to use than our previous system,” Rays says. “As a result, user adoption has been a big improvement for us.” The team enjoys the self-service options and visibility into cross-organizational data, which they did not have before. “The self-service capabilities have been a win-win across the organization. Individual teams can access data in real time as needed, and we don’t have to run reports ourselves, which saves us time,” says Erich Ekert, FP&A Manager at Project Worldwide.

With Jedox, Project Worldwide gives teams across the organization instant access to accurate data that previously took days to create. They now have a monthly actual versus forecast report to assess how their agencies performed compared to projections from the previous month. The report is automatically updated and always live. Before Jedox, it took the team hours to create the report manually. “Our cost elimination process used to take me almost a full day to balance every month, but with the process we designed in Jedox, it takes about 30 minutes,” says Ekert. The team has experienced an accelerated process each month since switching to Jedox.

“Our cost elimination process used to take me almost a full day to balance every month, but with the process we designed in Jedox, it takes about 30 minutes.”

– Erich Ekert, FP&A Manager, Project Worldwide

The biggest test for the team was in August when they were asked to create several reports within a short time frame. Initially, they were apprehensive about turning everything around in just a few days. “Despite the tall task, Jedox helped us hit the mark with virtually no stress,” Ekert says. This was exhilarating for a team that had been accustomed to a tedious manual process. “We have shaved days off our reporting process because creating, accessing, and sharing reports is much faster,” he says.

“When I think about how we produced our corporate projections before Jedox, there was always an error or ‘gotcha’ at the last minute. We don’t have that anymore. It is night and day with Jedox,” Ekert concludes.