Originally choosing the Board Intelligent Planning Platform to replace Excel-based financial reporting and forecasting processes, meat snack manufacturer Oberto has since expanded the use of the solution into areas such as payroll management, marketing expense tracking, and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) logs. The business is saving more than 20 hours per month in non-value-added tasks which have now been automated and streamlined to free staff up to work on other activities.
Con Board, somos capaces de ofrecer respuestas a los ejectutivos más rápidamente y ayudarlos a tomar decisiones de manera más dinámica.
Kyle Silva
Finance ManagerOberto Snacks started as a family-owned business in Seattle, Washington over 100 years ago in 1918. Today, it employs 500+ people and has three distinct brands specializing in meat snacks: Oberto, Pacific Gold, and Cattleman’s Cut. In May 2018, the business was acquired by Premium Brand Holdings.
The Challenge: An unclear picture of performance and forecasts
Oberto’s finance team supports the sales and marketing departments by assessing new item profitability data as well as forecasting product volume across all of its SKUs. These day-to-day processes were being managed exclusively in Excel spreadsheets and, without a consolidated view of the data, the organization struggled to present a clear picture of performance and forecasts. The lack of consistency and data automation frequently led to human errors.
The forecasting process was extremely manual and took about six hours to complete per week, amounting to more than 20 hours per month spent just on keeping the forecasting model maintained. Additionally, the long-term financial planning process, in which the business fully forecasted as far out as 10 years, could take a few months to complete.
Oberto wanted to improve these data procedures, reduce errors, and implement time-saving strategies, so launched a new digital finance transformation project.
«Being able to reduce the time spent on non-value-added work was big for us,» says Kyla Silva, Finance Manager.
The Solution: Automation outside of spreadsheets
After evaluating several competitor vendors, all of which resembled Excel and were limited in terms of functionality, Oberto decided that nothing came close to what they saw and valued in the Board Intelligent Planning Platform, which helps plan smarter and enables actionable insights in a flexible, customizable interface. Oberto was excited to use Board’s automated budgeting and reporting capabilities to improve data visualization, consolidation, and forecasting.
The Results: Adding value and time back into the business
With the Board platform now in place, in addition to eliminating 20 hours per month of non-value-added work, Oberto has seen tremendous results across multiple business areas that go beyond the initial scope of what they originally envisioned.
When the finance team started to use Board for budgeting and financial statements, they observed Board’s expansive capabilities and considered using the platform for tasks they would otherwise have had to introduce another tool for. The result was an expansion of the use of Board into a variety of other projects, including a payroll management tool, marketing expense tracking, standard operating procedure (SOP) logs, and new item setup forums with approval workflows.
«Board has really helped us to look at our data in many ways that we hadn’t before. Excel is very high level. With Board, we’re able to provide answers to the executives quicker and help them make decisions more dynamically,» adds Kyle.
