Complex Data, Fragile Models
Finance sits at the center of a core process whereby the company receives customer orders months in advance. Finance’s role is to translate these orders into budgets, forecasts, financial statements, cash flow projections, and capacity plans. This means working across hundreds of SKUs, bills of material, and standard costs to predict future costs and financial performance long before products are built.
“We have orders for about a year for all the medical products we make. We needed a system that could take those orders and blow out the cost into budgets, forecasts, and financial statements.”
Before Datarails, this planning lived in Excel. As the business grew, so did the workbooks, which became increasingly larger, slower, and increasingly difficult to maintain.
“Our big spreadsheet took 15 minutes just to open. It frequently crashed. There were always broken links, and something didn’t roll up correctly.”
The annual operating plan sapped a month of work from two finance professionals, while quarterly and monthly forecasts often took a further week or two. Instead of spending time analyzing the business, finance talent was sucked into maintaining spreadsheets.
For a company whose purchasing, production, inventory, and cash planning all depend on timely and reliable data, this wasn’t sustainable.
A Scalable Foundation for Manufacturing Businesses
When Robling Medical began evaluating FP&A solutions, the shortlist came down to Datarails and Cube Software.
The team wasn’t looking to replace Excel. They needed a platform that could handle the complexity of a manufacturing business, where hundreds of SKUs, standard costs, and operational data feed into budgets, forecasts, and financial statements.
While both platforms offered Excel-based planning, Datarails stood out for its superior cloud-based architecture and its ability to support those manufacturing requirements without forcing finance to abandon Excel.
I needed confidence that the platform could handle all of our SKUs and support standard costing, and I found that confidence with Datarails.
For Dave, that was an important distinction. Robling Medical wasn’t looking for a different way to build budgets. It was looking for a more reliable foundation that could scale as the business grew while still giving finance the flexibility of Excel.
Better Planning, Better Decisions
Our budget took about a month to do. Our quarterly or monthly forecasts would take a week or two. Datarails has transformed all that into hours.
But the impact went beyond time savings. Finance no longer spends its time maintaining spreadsheets. Instead of chasing broken links and troubleshooting formulas, the team can focus on understanding the business, supporting leadership, and responding more quickly when questions arise.
Datarails brought us not only speed, but confidence that the numbers are rolling up correctly and confidence in presenting those numbers to management.
Using Datarails’ drill-down capabilities, the finance team can quickly investigate sales volumes, pricing changes, inventory issues, and manufacturing variances without manually tracing data across spreadsheets.
The drill-down capability is huge. We can easily drill into sales volumes and pricing to understand what’s driving performance.
Long-Term Value
Robling Medical expects its business to continue growing, whether through new customers, expanded manufacturing activity, or future acquisitions.
For Dave, that’s where Datarails delivers long-term value. As the business grows through new customers or acquisitions, finance has a platform that can bring new financial data together without rebuilding its planning processes.
Any time you acquire another company, bringing the financial information together becomes one of the biggest challenges. With Datarails, we can consolidate the numbers much more easily.
Rather than worrying about whether its planning processes can keep pace, Robling Medical’s play a central part in the scaling of the business, with Datarails’ finance operating system as the foundation for insights, analysis and confidence in the numbers.
With Datarails, we found something that could grow with us without adding complexity or requiring a larger finance team to manage it.
