Context
- Leader in visual communication across Central and Eastern Europe
- Complex operations spanning 6 countries with 8 entities
- 6 different ERP systems in use (Pohoda, KORWIN, Kulcs Soft, proprietary databases)
- Financial consolidation required 20 days and over 100 hours monthly
- Contacted based on references for multi-country consolidation expertise
- Implementation duration of 3-4 months
Challenge
- Financial consolidation across 8 entities, 6 countries, and 6 different ERP systems consuming 20 days and 100+ hours monthly
- Growing group size increasing need for faster visibility and more efficient consolidation
- Fragmented data across disparate systems preventing unified view
- Significant time lag (3 weeks) between operational activity and consolidated reporting
- Financial team spending 90% of time on data collection rather than analysis
- Need for balance between maintaining existing systems and gaining integrated visibility
What Was Implemented
- Integration of all 6 ERP systems with automated data extraction multiple times daily
- Standardization of financial data into unified chart of accounts across entities
- Automation of multi-currency and multi-level consolidation reporting
- Unification of sales data from all 8 entities into single data structure
- Standardization of product categories and customer hierarchies across countries
- Automated daily dashboards with drill-down capability (Group - Country - Channel - Client - SKU)
- Active redirection of sales intelligence toward profitability drivers with analysis by product, customer, and country
- Additional pricing strategy review with active advisory for price adjustments
- Real-time margin monitoring for sustainable growth
- Integration of central warehouse with 6 local warehouses
- Standardization of product master data with automated ABC classification
- Real-time monitoring with alerts for order needs and allocation recommendations
- Active turnover monitoring at individual item level
- Proactive tracking and recommendations for replenishment and stock clearance cycles
- Phased implementation: Discovery, Build, Pilot in Slovakia, Scale to remaining countries
Outcomes
- Reporting process transformed from 20 days to real-time daily view
- Monthly consolidation effort reduced from 100 hours to 10 hours
- Time lag reduced from 3-week delay to daily updates
- Financial team shift from 90% data collection to 90% analysis focus
- Decisions based on current data rather than month-old Excel consolidations
- Continuous profitability growth despite market decline with growth in all operating countries while industry and local markets declined
- Improved inventory turnover and warehouse efficiency
- Approximately 300-400k EUR in cash freed from inefficient inventory
- Problem identified in Croatia on Monday morning and resolved by Wednesday
- Infrastructure scales seamlessly where adding new countries or entities does not require system rebuild
- Achievement without replacing existing systems, enterprise budgets, or year-long projects