Case Studies

Driving Supply Chain Finance Visibility After an Acquisition

2 minute read

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Following the acquisition of a better-for-you snack manufacturer, a global food company needed greater visibility across finance and supply chain operations. Catena Solutions delivered an automated, ERP-connected Tableau dashboard suite that provided real-time insights, streamlined reporting, and enabled faster, more confident decision making.

The Challenge: Limited Visibility After Rapid Growth

A global food company acquired a better-for-you snack manufacturer to expand its presence in the health snacks category. While the acquisition supported strategic growth, it also introduced complexity across finance and supply chain operations.

The newly acquired business relied on legacy reporting methods that were highly manual and time intensive. As a result, leaders lacked timely, actionable data needed to support quick decisions, identify risks, and manage performance effectively across the expanded organization.

The Solution: A Single Source of Truth

The company partnered with Catena Solutions to create greater transparency and actionable insights across the business. Catena assembled a cross-functional team, including a digital finance partner and a business intelligence consultant, to design and implement a scalable reporting solution.

Our consultants developed a suite of Tableau dashboards that brought critical data to the forefront, delivered advanced analytics, and enabled stakeholders to clearly visualize business performance. The dashboards were fully automated and seamlessly integrated with ERP data, creating a reliable single source of truth for decision making.

Dashboards Included:

• Weekly KPIs: Weekly reports and key market intel covering sales, customer, product line, service level, and inventory visibility and valuation.
• Volume reporting: Provided insights on quantity, weight, and unit level for sales, manufacturing, and inventory. Focused on movements inbound, outbound, and on-hand.
• P&L and balance sheet: Assisted with pre- and post-financial period close activities to detect variance in income statements and balance sheets. Included a level of drill down in the variance to see line level drivers.
• Overhead costing: Showed overhead spend analysis by country, entity, functions, and individual departments. Included variance analysis vs. plan, forecasts, and last year as well as walk/waterfalls highlighting key drivers of variance both in spend and spend as a percentage of sales.
• Head count reporting: Reported on head count vs. plan and spend per head count by function, department, and variance vs. plan and last year.
• Working capital and net cash from operations: Covered organizational metrics including Days Sales Outstanding, Days Payable Outstanding, and Days Inventory Outstanding. Also included walks to show variance in cash flow statements and provided in-depth analysis to show line level drivers of working capital, including AR by customers, payment terms analysis, AP by suppliers and terms analysis, inventory by product line/SKU and vs. demand and production plans.

The Benefit: Faster Decisions & Financial Control

With real-time dashboards in place, the company gained the visibility needed to drive organizational improvements and make faster, more informed decisions. Specifically, this included:

Facing similar challenges? Contact us to learn how we can help you improve visibility, decision making, and financial performance.