Ludwig Stüwe, respon­sible for Division Controlling at secure connectors provider Linxens, believes it is impor­tant to deter­mine the exact position: „The secure connec­tors industry is very compe­titive. Only those who know exactly what their costs are at all times can with­stand the fierce cut-throat compe­tition.“ In the past, group reporting at the end of the month-end closing cost time and nerves. The company wanted to identify the drivers of the gross margin as early as possible – but to do so, it had to resort to data loaded into the consoli­dation soft­ware from the produc­tion sites in Asia and Europe, at account level and without data depth.

Further analyses of the devia­tions and their causes were carried out on request by the local controllers, who used Micro­soft Excel to search for answers in SAP downloads. „When clari­fi­cations were required with loca­tions in other time zones and a different commu­ni­cation culture, this regularly led to frust­ration because we had to wait or expla­na­tions were not suffi­cient for our under­stan­ding,“ Stüwe adds. The DeltaMaster business intelli­gence soft­ware from Bissantz provided a remedy.

Bissantz convinced Linxens because of the open data manage­ment, the business and statistical analysis proce­dures and the visua­li­zation functions. In the first stage of the project, the SAP CO-PA module was connected in order to depict the income state­ment in DeltaMaster, and analysis applications for turn­over, gross margin and manu­fac­turing costs were deve­loped. „After just a few days, we were able to inter­ac­tively access the data in meetings using the navi­gation and analysis options,“ Stüwe reports.