Collaborative Solutions Enhances Approach to Modern Business Planning with Tidemark
Global Expansion Prompts Leading Consulting Firm to Abandon Spreadsheet-Based Planning for Tidemark's Cloud-First Enterprise Performance Management Applications
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 26, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Tidemark, the cloud-based enterprise analytics company, today announced another fast-growing organization has traded spreadsheets for Tidemark enterprise performance management applications.
Collaborative Solutions, fueled by its success as a leading consulting firm for Workday, has been growing rapidly and expanding throughout North America and into Europe. But a manual budgeting and forecasting process built around Excel spreadsheets made it difficult for the company's financial planning and analysis (FP&A) operation to provide the accuracy and insights Collaborative Solutions needed to keep pace with its rapid growth.
"We've grown steadily for a decade, but as market demand for modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions has increased over the last couple of years, our business has just exploded," said Carroll Ross, founder and CEO of Collaborative Solutions. "Amid all this growth, we discovered our spreadsheet-based budgets, plans and forecasts couldn't keep up with the pace of our business. Now with Tidemark, we have a platform – and a partner – that can grow along with us."
After implementing Tidemark in 2013, Collaborative Solutions transformed labor-intensive FP&A processes to more accurately forecast expenses and better align resources with projected demand.
Streamlining the Budgeting Process
Bobby Riggs, vice president of finance at Collaborative Solutions, said creating budgets and forecasts previously involved "entering an infinite number of expense and revenue items one at a time." That, along with the "enormous" task of consolidating multiple spreadsheets into one, simply proved too burdensome for a fast-growing company. "With Tidemark, it's all seamless within the same system," said Riggs. "Tidemark creates a workflow that allows us to see all those changes at a granular level so we can quickly identify what expenditures to approve."
Aligning Resources with Opportunities
Because Tidemark apps give users a full view of the key internal and external factors that drive business performance, Collaborative Solutions can look beyond a single line item to uncover profit opportunities throughout the business. "With Tidemark we can find answers to questions we never thought to ask before," said Riggs. "Not only can we look into the piece of our business that generates the best returns, but we can drill down into that piece and investigate our best-performing engagements." Riggs said the company can also dive into sales data by customer, market, region, cost of sales and other dimensions to pinpoint where specific sales people generate the best results. Collaborative Solutions can use this information to deploy people where they are likely to be the most successful.
Actionable Insights for All
Now that spreadsheet-based FP&A is history at Collaborative Solutions, Riggs said he plans to bring 40 of the company's managers into the budgeting and planning process using Tidemark Storylines, which graphically and intuitively illustrates financial and performance data as reader-friendly infographics. "Tidemark makes it very easy for us to put in a revenue or profit forecast and know almost instantly whether that forecast is attainable with either current or projected resources," he said. "We can make intelligent business decisions on how to get there."
A Tidemark partner, Collaborative Solutions leveraged its expertise as a leading consulting firm to play a pivotal role in Tidemark's acclaimed integration with Workday solutions with customers such as Brown University.
About Collaborative Solutions
Collaborative Solutions is a go-to Workday consulting partner with an exceptional track record of customer success. Since 2007 we have executed over 175 successful Workday HCM, Payroll, and Financials deployments for global Fortune 500 companies, medium-sized businesses, and education and government institutions. We have implemented in over 100 countries and have experience with organizations ranging from 1,000 to 200,000 employees. We put the work in Workday. For more information, visit www.collaborativesolutions.com.
About Tidemark
Tidemark helps companies foster a culture of performance with cloud-based enterprise analytics that engage the entire organization in business transformation. Tidemark's apps involve multiple lines of business in core enterprise performance management processes, such as planning, forecasting and analysis, for greater collaboration and context. Leading companies transforming their businesses with Tidemark include Chiquita, Hostess Brands, Chuck E. Cheese's, HubSpot, ServiceSource and Brown University. Tidemark is funded by Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital and Dave Duffield. To learn more about Tidemark, please visit www.tidemark.com or follow us on twitter @TidemarkEPM.
Additional Resources
Tidemark Video: What We Do – http://www.tidemark.com/resources/videos/tidemark-what-we-do
Tidemark Storylines – http://www.tidemark.com/financial-performance-storylines
Our blog – http://tidemark.com/blog/
SOURCE Tidemark
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